Too right, Harry would have thought if anyone had let him see the file. Day after day, living with those filthy bastards, eating with them, talking with them, crapping with them. Watching for new cars, watching for movement after curfew, observing the huddles in the coffee shops. And always the fear, and the horror if they came too close to him, seemed too interested, talked too much. The terrible fear of discovery, and the pain that would follow. And the know-alls in intelligence back at headquarters who only met an NLF man when he was neatly parcelled up in their basement cells, and who pass discreet little messages — about hanging on a few more days, just a little bit longer. They’d seemed surprised when he just walked up to an army patrol one hot, stinking morning, and introduced himself, and walked out of thirteen weeks of naked terror. And no mention in the files on him of the nervous breakdown, and the days of sick leave. Just a metal cross and an inch square of purple and white cloth to dangle it from, all there was to show for it.
Davidson was moving about the room in sharp darts around the obstacles of furniture.
‘I don’t have to tell you from your past experience that everything that is said in this room this morning goes under the Official Secrets Act. But I’ll remind you of that anyway. What we say in here, the people you’ve seen here, and the building and its location are all secret.
‘Your name was put forward when we came into the market for a new man for an infiltration job. We’ve seen the files on the Aden experience, and the need has now come up for a man unconnected with any of the normal channels to go in and work in a most sensitive area. The work has been demanded by the Prime Minister. Yesterday afternoon he authorized the mission, and I must say frankly it was against, as I understand it, the advice of his closest military advisers. Perhaps that’s putting it a bit strong, but there’s some scepticism… the PM had a brother in SOE thirty years ago, he has heard over Sunday lunch how the infiltration of agents into enemy country won the war, and they say he’s had a bee about it ever since.
‘He wants to put a man into the heart of Provo-land, into the Falls in Belfast — a man who is quite clean and has no form in that world at all. The man should not be handled by any of the existing intelligence and undercover groups. He’d be quite new, and to all intents he’d be on his own as far as looking after himself is concerned. I think anyone who has thought even a little about what the PM is asking for knows that the job he has asked us to do is bloody dangerous. I haven’t gilded it, Harry. It’s a job we’ve been asked to do, and we all think from what we’ve read of you that you are the ideal man for it. Putting it formally, this is the bit where you either stand up and say ‘Not effing likely’, and walk out through the door and we’ll have you on a flight to Berlin in three hours. Or it’s the time when you come in and then stay in.’
The man at the table with the files shuffled his papers. Harry was a long way from a rational evaluation of the job, whatever it was they were offering. He was just thinking how large a file they’d got on him when he became aware of the silence in the room.
Harry said, ‘I’ll try it.’
‘You appreciate, Harry, once you say “yes”, that’s it. That has to be the definitive decision.’
‘Yes, I said yes. I’ll try it.’ Harry was almost impatient with Davidson’s caution.
The atmosphere in the room seemed to change. The man behind Harry coughed. Davidson was on the move again, the file now open in his hand.
‘We’re going to put you into the Falls with the express and only job of listening for any word of the man who shot the Minister, Danby, three days ago. Why aren’t they doing it from Belfast? Basic reason is they’ve no longer got an infiltration set-up that we’re happy with. They used to do it, lost out, and have pretty much withdrawn their men to let them stooge on the outside and collect the stuff they want from informers. The activity has been down over the last few months, and with the risk that exists — I’m being straight with you, Harry — of an undercover man being picked off, and the hullabaloo when it hits the fan, those sort of operations have been scaled down. There is a thought that the intelligence division over there is not as tight as it ought to be. We’ve been asked to set up a new operation. Intelligence in Belfast won’t handle you, we will. The Special Branch over there won’t have heard of you. Whatever else your problems may be they won’t be that someone is going to drop you in it over there, because no-one will know of your existence. If you have a message you pass it to us. A phone call to us, on the numbers we give you, will be as fast — if you want to alert the military — as anything you could do if you were plugged into the regular Lisburn net, working under their control.
‘I stress again, this is the PM’s idea. He raised it at the security meeting yesterday and insisted we push it forward. The RUC don’t want you, and the military regard it as something of a joke. We reckon we’ll need you here for two weeks before we fly you in, and in that time they may have the man, or at least have a name on him. If that happens then we call the whole thing off, and you can relax and go back to Germany. It’s not a bad thing that they don’t want to know — we won’t have to tell them anything till it’s ripe, and that way we keep it tight.’
He’d wondered whether to mention the Prime Minister’s involvement, and thought about it at length the previous evening. If this man were to be captured and talk under torture the balloon would be sky high, the reverberations catastrophic. But there was another side to it. Any man asked to do as dangerous a job as the one envisaged had the right to know where the orders originated; to be certain he wasn’t the puppet on the end of wire manipulated for the benefit of a second-rate operation. It was Davidson’s own inclination to be open, and he reckoned that apart from everything else a man in these circumstances needed all the morale-building he could get.
‘So far the police and military have put out pictures, appeals, rewards, launched raids, checked all the usual angles, and they haven’t come up with anything. I don’t know whether you would. The PM’s decided we try and that’s what’s going to happen.
‘I’m sorry, but on this there cannot be a phone call to your wife. We’ve told her you’ve been called away on urgent posting. This morning she’s been told you’re on your way to Muscat, because of your special Aden knowledge. We have some postcards you can write to her later and we’ll get them posted by the RAF for you.
‘I said at the beginning this would be dangerous. I don’t want to minimize that. The IRA shoot intelligence men they get their hands on. They don’t rough them up and leave them for a patrol to find, they kill them. The last man of ours that they took was tortured. Catholics who work for us have been beaten up, burned, lacerated, hooded and then killed. They’re hard bastards… but we want this man badly.’
Davidson paused in his stride, jolting Harry’s attention. Harry fidgeted and shifted in the chair. He hated the pep talks. This one was damn near a carbon copy of the one he’d had in Aden, though then the PM’s name had been left out, and they were quoting top secret instructions from GOC Land Forces Mid East.
Davidson suggested coffee. The work would start after the break.
The Prime Minister had been hearing a report on the latest speech to a Bulawayo farming conference of the rebel Prime Minister — his ‘illegal counterpart’, as he liked to call him. He scanned the pages quickly and deftly, assimilating the nuances the Rhodesian’s speech writers had written in for the reader on the other side of the world. It was a static situation, he decided, not one for a further initiative at this stage. When his secretary had left him he turned back to his desk from the window and dialled an unlisted number at the Ministry of Defence.