Scoundrel

by Bernard Cornwell

  Michael gazed up at me. That question scared him, but he was too cowed, too miserable and too wretched to dare tell a lie and so he shook his head.

  Which meant he was freelancing. He and Brendan. None of this had been approved by the Provisional IRA’s Army Council. The whole thing was an unsanctioned operation. “There never were any Stingers, were there?” I asked.

  “There would have been!” Michael pleaded. “We could have bought every Stinger on the market! That’s what we were going to do, Paul! Don’t you understand? We had to make money! I wanted Boston to be more important than Tripoli again! I wanted to see Ireland free!” The last word was a despairing cry as another spasm of illness wrenched him forwards.

  “So who were those Cubans?”

  “The Arabs provided them. We had to convince you that there really were Stingers.”

  Oh Christ, I thought, but Carlos and Alvarez had probably been the genuine articles; straight out of Cuba with Fidel’s cigar-smoke reeking in their nostrils. “Bastard,” I told Herlihy, then I gave Quick Colleen’s throttles a thrust, driving her fast on to the plane before whipping her into some fast S-turns, spinning and flogging her through the merciless sea. Herlihy was screaming and sobbing. I had never known the exquisite punishment of seasickness, but I had seen enough sufferers to know that its misery could prise the truth out of the most secretive of sinners.

  I cut the throttles again, letting the sleek hull settle into the small waves. The shore was a mile away now. Michael was gagging and moaning; a man in anguish. “Tell me,” I demanded, “what is in that boat and worth ten million dollars of Saddam Hussein’s money?”

  “I don’t know. They just asked us to deliver the boat to Washington.”

  “And what were you to do with me?”

  “Nothing.” He looked up at me, tendrils of vomit trailing from his blue lips. “Honest!”

  I put a hand to the throttles.

  “You were to be killed!” He said it pathetically, begging me not to touch the throttle levers. “You and the two boys.”

  “Because the Rebel Lady,” I said, “was never to be associated with the IRA, is that it?”

  “Yes!” He gazed beseechingly at me. His rumpled suit was flecked with vomit and seawater.

  “And you and Brendan were willing to help Saddam Hussein attack America?”

  “We didn’t know what it was about!” he protested.

  “Oh, you did, Michael. You may not know what’s inside Rebel Lady, but you knew damn well she isn’t carrying a goodwill card for the President.”

  “She brought us money,” he said, “and I’ll give the money towards the cause. Ireland will be free!”

  “Oh it will,” I said, “I promise you that, but it won’t need your help, because Ireland doesn’t need traitors like you.”

  “I’m not a traitor.”

  “You’re a piece of shit, Michael, a piece of legal shit.” And I pushed the throttles forward, gave the boat two punishing and gut-wrenching turns, then headed hard for the shore.

  And wondered just what lay in the dark belly of the Rebel Lady.

  Washington, DC lies ninety-five miles from the mouth of the Potomac River. Rebel Lady would probably have done most of those miles under power after her delivery crew had sailed her south from Cape Cod. The weather had been kind, so they had probably taken the outside route to Sandy Hook, then down to Cape May where they would have taken her by canal and river into the Chesapeake Bay. Then, once into the Potomac, they would have motored her up to the nation’s capital and, if they had remembered the old tradition that honoured George Washington, they would have sounded the ship’s bell as they passed Mount Vernon.

  Once in the city itself they would have taken the Virginia Channel where, just south of the Pentagon and north of the airport, the Virginia Shore Marine Depot lay. In winter the dilapidated yard was a storage place for cruisers and dismasted yachts. It was a dispiriting place, nothing but a mucky run-down yard hedged behind by the expressway looping off the river bridges and in front by the gantries and pylons that stood in a bay of the Potomac to hold the approach lights for Washington National Airport’s main runway. The big jets screamed overhead.

  “Of course we’re not as well known as the Sailing Marina to the south of the airport,” the yard’s manager shouted to me as a passenger jet thundered above us, “but we’ve got more depth of water than the Pentagon Lagoon.” The smell of kerosene settled around us in the wake of the huge plane. I could see the Washington Monument across the river and beyond it, to my right, the last gleams of reflected sunlight from the Capitol Dome. The Capitol, like the White House, was a little over two miles away while the Pentagon was just one mile north. Rebel Lady had been brought like a plague bacillus right into the very heart of the Republic. “So what’s all this about?” the manager asked and, when I said nothing, he tried to prompt me. “They paid good money for her storage. Cash!”

  “I’m sure they did.”

  Once she had reached the yard Rebel Lady had been craned out of the water and cradled among a score of plastic-wrapped yachts. Her hull had been supported by metal jackstands and her thick keel rested on big wooden blocks. On Herlihy’s orders her new name had been painted out, making her just one more anonymous boat among the hundreds of craft stored in Washington’s boatyards during the bitter winter months.

  Now, at dusk on the day which had started with Quick Colleen in Nantucket Sound, I stood where Rebel Lady had been hidden away. Rebel Lady herself had already been taken away to have her secret excised, but I had wanted to come to the boatyard to see for myself just where Saddam Hussein’s revenge on America would have been triggered.

  “Shame what they did to her,” the manager said. “Wrecking an interior like that.”

  “Wicked,” I agreed.

  “Funny thing, though. She had a Florida manufacturer’s nameplate on her coachroof, but she wasn’t built in the States.”

  “No, she wasn’t.” The real Rebel Lady, now called Roistn, waited for me in Ardgroom. I had decided I did not like that new name. I would change it back. Or find another name. Scoundrel perhaps? Then I would go and claim my boat and sail her back across the Atlantic.

  “One of my guys reckoned she was French-built,” the manager told me, “but she was a hell of a lot heavier than any French boat I’ve ever seen.”

  “I know. I sailed her.” That crossing of the Mediterranean seemed so long ago now. I suddenly remembered Liam’s dead eyes gleaming emerald with the reflected lamplight.

  “You sailed her? So what was it all about?” the manager asked eagerly.

  “Smuggling. Cocaine.” I offered him the answer which he would find most believable.

  “I reckoned as much. The stuff was hidden in that big keel, eh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I know so!” he said happily. “I was here when they X-rayed her. They got excited, I can tell you! Excited!” He gestured towards the vacant hard-standing where Rebel Lady had been parked and where all that was now left of her presence were abandoned keel-blocks, jackstands, and the cumbersome X-ray equipment that was used to survey the health of hidden keel-bolts. “You think we’ll be on the TV news?” the manager asked me hopefully.

  I shook my head. “You don’t want to be on the evening news, believe me, not with that boat. But thank you for letting me see the place.”

  “You’re welcome.” He tried to hide his disappointment. “And if you ever need boat storage in the nation’s capital, Mr…?” He hesitated, inviting my name, but I shook my head again and walked away. It was nearly dark and the runway’s approach lights shimmered their reflections in the river’s hurrying water. A plane roared close overhead as I climbed into the back seat of the government car and slammed the door.

  It had all been so close. And so clever. Whatever it was, which now, in the city’s evening traffic, I went to find out.

  Rebel Lady had been taken to one of the military reservations close to Washington where, in a great
empty hangar, she stood forlorn under massive bright lights. I found van Stryker in a glass-walled booth from where he intently watched the white-garbed team that worked underneath the jacked-up hull. “It’s in the lead keel,” he told me without taking his eyes off the boat and without saying what ‘it’ was.

  The huge bulbous keel had already been taken off Rebel Lady. Like most ballast keels it had been secured to the fibreglass hull by long silicon-bronze stud bolts. Van Stryker’s team had loosened the bolts and gently lowered the keel to the hangar floor. Standing beside the exposed keel, which was now hidden from my view by the men and women in their protective clothing, was a bright yellow flask as big as a compact car and decorated with the three-leaved insignia of the nuclear industry. “It was a bomb?” I asked in horror as I recognised the symbol.

  “No. He doesn’t have the technology to make a bomb, not yet.” Van Stryker looked tired. His job was to preserve the republic from the attacks of terrorists and he knew just how close this attack had come to success, and now he was thinking of the other attacks that would doubtless come in the future. “Someone’s going to make the bomb, Paul, someone who thinks they can change the world in their favour by setting it off. But not this time.”

  “So what is it?”

  “A small sliver of Chernobyl.”

  “Chernobyl?”

  Van Stryker sipped at a brown plastic mug of coffee. “We think the Iraqis hollowed out that keel and filled it with around four tons of uranium-dioxide. That’s the nuclear fuel you put in ordinary commercial power stations like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. They chopped the fuel rods into pellets and mixed them up with powdered aluminum and what looks like ammonium nitrate. That means they mixed the uranium into a huge firebomb. Then they added a detonator and a timer. Simple, really, and comparatively cheap.”

  “And what will that lot do?”

  “The firebomb would have reached a temperature of over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and once the nuclear fuel caught fire it would have spread a miniature plume of radioactivity just like the Chernobyl plume.” Van Stryker offered me a sudden sympathetic glance. “Don’t worry, Paul, my experts say you probably weren’t exposed to excessive radiation. By sheathing that horror in lead and keeping it under water they gave you protection. Then you made yourself even safer by piling the gold on top.”

  I stared at the white-dressed figures. “What would the bomb have done to Washington?”

  “If the wind had been southerly then their toxic bonfire might have made the Pentagon untenable for years to come, or even the White House. What a revenge for Baghdad that would have been.” Van Stryker fell silent for a few seconds. “Think of a city contaminated with radioactive isotopes; strontium and caesium. Think of the birth-defects, think of the cancers. That’s why they wanted the boat out of the water when the detonator triggered, so the fire could start properly. If she’d been floating it would have been snuffed out and at best just contaminated a few miles of river, but on dry land, and with a good wind, they might have smeared a hundred square miles with lethal poisons.”

  “This wasn’t the IRA’s doing, you know that?” I told van Stryker.

  “Your IRA,” he said flatly, “was the only organisation to support Saddam Hussein with bombs. Don’t make excuses for terrorism. Don’t try to tell me they’re just misled heroes.”

  “I just said…”

  “I heard you what you said, Paul, and I understand your mixed loyalties.” He stared at the bright arc lights and the busy men and the bright yellow flask. “Did you know that when George Washington couldn’t find uniforms for his men he made them place scraps of white paper in their hats? He was saying, these are my warriors, these are your targets. He didn’t hide them, he didn’t send them home to hide behind women’s skirts at day’s end. He was a man.”

  I said nothing, but just stared at Rebel Lady. A rope’s bitter end hung from her gunwale and I wondered if she would ever sail again. I doubted it, and I thought how unfair to a boat that her last voyage should be under such false pretences. She deserved one last romp through high seas with full sail and no unfair ballast slowing her down.

  “The Garda arrested Flynn this afternoon,” van Stryker said.

  “Will you extradite him?”

  “No. The less the public know about this, the better. Nuclear matters seem to bring out the most hysterical aspects of the American people so I shall try very hard to keep all this secret. But Flynn will be taught that Uncle Sam is not easily mocked. The Garda will find something with which to charge him, and a few years in Portlaoise Jail should teach him to respect us.”

  “And Herlihy?”

  Van Stryker shook his head. “There’s too many lawyers round him to make a trumped-up charge stick, but I think the Internal Revenue Service could be persuaded to make his life a misery.”

  “And what of me?” I asked.

  “On the whole,” he said, “you’ve been on the side of the angels. We’ll give you some back pay, Paul. Say a hundred thousand? You can make a new start with that.”

  “Yes.” I sounded sour. “But it isn’t five million, is it?”

  “Which the Brits have suddenly agreed to turn over to us,” van Stryker said grimly. “I have spoken sternly to Miss Ko.” A telephone suddenly buzzed, cutting off van Stryker’s tale of how he had dealt with the perfidious British. He answered the phone and I saw one of the protectively clothed figures beside the gutted Rebel Lady speaking into the other handset. Van Stryker grunted a few times, thanked the man, then put the telephone down. “July 4,” he said slowly. “The timer was set for noon on Independence Day. It’s a fair bet Washington will be crowded that day. Maybe a victory parade for Desert Storm? Maybe a nation’s street party?” Van Stryker sounded angry, and no wonder, for who among the crowd celebrating America’s independence would have thought twice about a plume of smoke across the river, or would have sensed the invisible fall of deadly isotopes seeping across the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue?

  “I very nearly brought it about, didn’t I?” I spoke in bitter recrimination.

  “Did you?” van Stryker asked in a tone of mild disbelief. He was again staring at the crippled boat and the bright flask.

  “By not telling you about Rebel Lady.”

  “Oh, we knew something was up, and I suppose we’d have discovered the boat eventually.” He still spoke mildly, and I remembered his stricture that everything should be done according to the rules, unless, of course, a man was outside the rules, and that surely included the British team that had abducted me? And how could terrorism be fought strictly within the rules? Due process was a feeble weapon compared with a firebomb laced with soap-flakes or a Kalashnikov in the hands of a bitter youth. I remembered an IRA man complaining in a Lifford pub how he had just lost two men to an SAS ambush. “There used to be rules,” he had told me bitterly, “but now the focking Brits are fighting just like us.” Could terrorism only be defeated by terror? That was a horrid question, as horrid as the scene in the brightly lit hangar where a small crane was lowering a pallet loaded with what looked like mounds of dull silver powder into the flask. “A toxic nuclear cocktail,” van Stryker explained.

  “But it isn’t over, is it?” I said. “Il Hayaween won’t stop with this failure.”

  “But he’s lost the initiative, Paul, and we’ll be setting traps for him and, thanks to the Gulf war, he’s lost some of his old hiding places. This is a victory, Paul.” He gestured at the broken boat. “It isn’t the last victory, because you can’t beat terrorism, only contain it, but my God this feels good, and maybe it will feel better soon? We’re going to make the bastards who sent us that present dance to Uncle Sam’s tune for a little while, and who knows? We might even dance them into an early grave.”

  “I suppose,” I said slowly, “that I should thank you for keeping me out of an early grave?”

  “You don’t have to thank me.” Van Stryker did not look at me as he spoke, but instead watched as men uncoiled hoses with
which to wash down the hangar. “When I sent you out fourteen years ago I never expected to see you again. We sent others, don’t ask who, and so far you’re the only one to come back. Two others certainly won’t return and a third might have joined our enemies. It wasn’t an easy job you did, and I don’t suppose you feel clean about it, but you served your country, Paul. You have preserved the republic from evil, and for that it is my duty to thank you.” He turned and held out his hand. “So, as far as I am concerned, you can go with a clear conscience.”

  It was a bright night, the sky ablaze with stars above a clean country that was safe from harm. I walked to the car, breathing a cold air, and I wondered what the hell would happen now.

  “The airport, sir?” the driver asked.

  “Please,” I said, and we drove away, leaving behind us the bright facility with its parked helicopters and low loaders and armed men and yellow lamps and warning signs. The sentries waved us through the guardpost, and the brilliant lights disappeared behind as we drove through the dark woods towards the small safe towns of America. The small towns of decent folk who are so hated by the terrorists.

  I would go home now to my own small town, but I guessed, after all, that I would not stay there. There would be no peace for me, not yet, for ghosts still stalked my world and I did not know how to exorcise them; nor would il Hayaween abandon me, for I had made a fool of him and he would want me dead. I thought of Roisin’s eyes in the instant before I had pulled the trigger. Oh dear God, but the paths we choose so heedlessly. The lights of Washington smeared the sky ahead, and I thought of a fire blossoming in a city, of death dropping soft as snowflakes across wide avenues. I closed my eyes. In the spring, I thought, I would go to Ireland, and I would take my boat to sea and I would let her take me somewhere, I did not know where, I did not care where, just anywhere that a scoundrel might find refuge.

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