The plan was his, really; and it was perfectly matched in his mind’s eye.
He had come to the chiefs of the IRA Provos with a plan they were willing to accept.
The IRA was in desperate trouble after nearly a decade of civil war and urban-guerrilla actions in Northern Ireland. The bombings in England had not cowed the English and had not made them weary of their dirty little war. Likewise, the bombings in the South had not stirred the Irish public to support — rather the opposite. The greatest mistake of all had been the bombing in the center of Dublin which had killed nearly two dozen poor shoppers.
Faolin had argued persuasively that such bombings did not finally terrorize but rather enervated people and made them accept the horror of random death with the fatalism of people who must live with it every day. The way the Londoners were in the Second War, he had said: Each day that passed made them stronger, more resistant to the Nazi terror from the sky. The same thing appeared to have happened to the Americans in their war in Vietnam, he said.
The hearts and minds of the Irish must be rallied again to the Cause by a bold and stunning action which would both finance the future — and direct the attention of the ordinary people toward their true enemies.
The council had listened gravely — spellbound — to this glittering, twisted man as he laid the plan out to them.
No more bombings, he had said. Not just to end the horror, but to lull the British into thinking the IRA was giving up.
They had been reluctant to agree — until they had heard the second part of the plan.
Lord Slough, Faolin had said, the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth the Second. He would inaugurate the first hovercraft service uniting England and Ireland in the fall (the original date had been October first).
The council members had nodded. They knew this. Everyone in Britain knew it. Lord Slough had commissioned a new model of the jet-powered boat that rode above the waves and was already in operation in the English Channel between Dover and Calais. The new hovercraft would be a larger, faster, stronger vessel, capable of handling rougher seas than the early models and capable of making the tedious eight-hour crossing between Liverpool and Dublin in forty-five minutes.
In a long article in the Sunday Times, Lord Slough — identified by the papers as the richest man in Britain and one of the richest in the non-Arab world — said the rejuvenation of the Dublin-Liverpool run would be the first step in linking Britain and then Europe by these superhovercraft. In two years, he said, he would operate private hovercraft lines between London and Edinburgh, London and Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool, and Belfast and Dublin. Pledges of cooperation and support from the governments of the Republic of Ireland and from Great Britain had already been offered.
They had all read it by the time Faolin met with them; Faolin had made sure of that. And made sure at the meeting that they all became heartily sick of Lord Slough and his wealth and power; of his oil interests in the North Sea and the firm he controlled which was at that moment drilling test holes in the murky Atlantic depths off Galway Bay on Ireland’s impoverished and beautiful west coast. Faolin recounted Lord Slough’s holdings in the biggest motorcar firm in Britain and of the factory in Northern Ireland where Irish workers — at below-scale pay — assembled the machines. What Lord Slough did not own outright, said Faolin, he could buy, including all the right politicians in the Irish Dáil and in the English House of Commons. It was common knowledge, said Faolin, and the council members had nodded their heads sagely.
Faolin built up Lord Slough in that meeting, and as he did so, he built up their resentment of him. Finally, almost eloquently, he had said;
“I said to you that our enemy is not the ordinary man and that is why y’must stop yer bombing. Is our enemy a mail clerk who opens a parcel for Lord Slough and has his hands blown off fer the trouble? Is it that woman and her child blown to kingdom come on Royal Avenue the other day because some fool decides to blow down the doors of the Belfast Telegraph? No, they are not; not any of them; not English or Irish or what. Our enemy is Lord Slough, but we let him alone. He starves Irishmen in his factories, accumulatin’ greedy wealth with the tears of orphans whose daddies have died in his Welsh mines. Our enemy is Slough as privilege and power and unaccountable wealth is our enemy.”
They had been silent. Folding their hands like students on the first day of class, they had listened.
“And what of our great political leaders? Of the Prime Minister of England who ruthlessly sends his soldiers to kill our wives and children in the streets of our broken old city? Or the Taoiseach of the Republic — a republic in name alone — who cynically sells out to the British at every opportunity and who betrays us and our comrades when told to do so by Whitehall? I don’t need to tell ya who our enemies really are — but I do so because you have been blinded by their wealth and power. Y’ve doffed yer caps like Clare farmers t’them. Y’ve deferred to them because they are yer betters—”
Oh, they had resented that. They had become angry. And Faolin had played on their anger.
“Yer children,” he hissed. “Children who play at revolution and war and then run away when yer old one comes t’get ya.”
“What’s yer plan, Faolin?” one finally asked angrily. “What’s yer bleedin’ plan?”
Faolin had turned on his bad leg, turned and fixed his questioner with a dark, withering eye. “Me plan, boyo, is to drive our enemies into the sea.”
Was he mad? They had stared at him and watched a smile slowly spread on that face which was not made to smile.
As his final argument, he read a piece from the Irish Times concerning the hovercraft aloud to them.
“ ‘The cost of the scheme, while not announced, is thought to be a hundred million pounds. However, it is only the first step in a network of hovercraft services to be operated by Lord Slough’s Anglo-Irish Lines linking major cities on both islands. Lord Slough said he had the full confidence and cooperation of the British government.
“ ‘The Taoiseach (of Ireland) said that Lord Slough’s scheme would provide two hundred fifty new jobs in the country, and that it was estimated that eight million pounds annually would be pumped into the economy. He praised what he called “the foresight and courage” of Lord Slough.
“ ‘It is expected that the Prime Ministers of both countries will accompany Lord Slough and his party on the inaugural run of the first superhovercraft, which Lord Slough said would be named for his daughter, Brianna.’ ”
Faolin let the clipping fall on the floor. He stared at the nine men before him.
“It is expected,” he said. “It is expected that Lord Slough and the Prime Ministers of England and Ireland will accompany him on this inaugural journey. It is expected.”
And he had given them the plan. Faolin and his men would seize the craft at Liverpool harbor and take it out into the middle of the Irish Sea with its precious cargo. And there they would broadcast to the world that the lives of Slough and the politicians — and whoever else accompanied him, perhaps even a member of the royal family — would be spared on two conditions — the payment of a ransom of one hundred million pounds and the release from Long Kesh and the other internment camps of all IRA prisoners.
The men of the council were stunned at first. They believed in the old ways of war — believed in bombs and sniping at soldiers and shooting informers down on dark streets; believed in terror. Faolin had been prepared for their intransigence: He talked all morning and into the afternoon and he beat down their conservatism. They realized that the IRA had fallen on bad days; they had no money and little support; the conduit of funds from America was drying up, although still strong by standards placed against funds from other places. The Palestinians had withdrawn their financial support. Worse, a peace movement had grown up spontaneously among a group of Catholic mothers who professed themselves sick of the killing in the North. Everything that Faolin said was true — a bold action was needed to recover the initiative in this war of attrition that the British were winning. Yet what he said was so radical—