“Our papers are good!” Objected Sean O’Flynn the older, at twenty-three of the two IRA men hand-picked from the Kildare Brigade to accompany McCormick to England. Both Reynolds and O’Flynn were killers, men from the north, Derry, who had been at war all their short adult lives. McCormick had no illusion why two such men had been sent with him to the mainland; the IRA high command needed his technical skills but they could not bring themselves to actually trust him.
“They are as good as the guys in Dublin could make them,” McCormick reminded him. “Good enough to fool some lazy RUC,” Royal Ulster Constabulary, “boy, but things are different over here. We have to assume the Brits know we’re coming by now.”
Neither of McCormick’s watchdogs thought it was possible that they had been betrayed. Their hatred for the Brits had long since morphed into contempt and it was always a mistake to hold one’s enemy in contempt. It made one sloppy and they could not afford to make a mistake.
Frank Reynolds was the marginally more thoughtful of the IRA men.
Just twenty-one a Loyalist bully boy gang had beaten his father to a pulp when he was eleven, leaving his mother and his seven siblings alone to fend for themselves in a friendless Belfast enclave. One of his brothers was a priest, two of his sisters were married with children in the south but his mother still lived on the Falls Road in West Belfast, now an IRA-run no go area for the RUC unless the British Army rolled in with armoured personnel carriers and machine-gun carrying Land Rovers.
“We were told you’d tell us what was in the coffins when we got to the mainland?”
“We aren’t there yet,” Seamus McCormick grunted. He had refused to let either of the other men drive the Bedford. He had been trained to drive bigger vehicles than the Bedford, the Derry boys had not. The lorry was a beast, the wheel was heavy and the gear box old and worn, the engine not much better as befitted a vehicle cobbled together out of whatever could be surreptitiously liberated from scrap yards and maintenance depot disposal bins. If either O’Flynn or Reynolds tried to drive the Bedford they would attract far too much attention.
“We’re near enough to the mainland,” Sean O’Flynn decided.
McCormick relented; he needed the IRA men to trust him.
“Three of the coffins contain partially assembled prototype shoulder-launched General Dynamics Redeye surface-to-air missiles,” he said, having to shout above the ragged roaring of the engine. “The other coffin contains a fully assembled M171 surface-to-air missile launcher, two M-16s and three Browning forty-five pistols, around two hundred rounds of small arms ammunition, fuse wire, half-a-dozen mercury detonators and about eleven pounds of military grade plastic explosive.”
The two IRA men were dumbfounded.
A few guns and plastic explosive, or possibly good old-fashioned dynamite had been what they had assumed they were smuggling into England. But surface-to-air missiles!
Seamus McCormick would have told them more about their deadly cargo but he did not think his half-tame assassins needed to know any more. All they needed to know was one further piece of information.
“Without me you wouldn’t even be able to assemble the Redeyes without blowing yourself up. I am the only man in the IRA who actually knows how to assemble a Redeye, how to load it into the launch tube and how to fire it at an aircraft in flight. Your job is to keep me alive long enough to shoot all three at British aircraft. Do you boys have any questions?”
No, neither had a question. It was hard to ask any kind of sensible question when your lower jaw had just dropped onto your chest.
The two gunmen would learn the rest when they needed to know.
Likewise, they would learn — or rather, work out for themselves — that if everything had gone to plan another active service group would have been on the ground in England paving the way for their mission for over three weeks, but only when they needed to know it. By now there ought to be safe houses waiting, secure depots established where the ‘equipment’ in the coffins could be ‘parked’, and viable ‘launch sites’ identified and plans formulated to transfer him and the other ‘shooters’ he was going to train into position.
The object of the exercise was nothing short of striking a blow so devastating that it would undermine the British will to stay in Ireland. Leastways, that was the objective of the Irish Republican Army Council back in Dublin and the hope of the handful of lower and middle ranking Irish civil servants, policemen, soldiers and several disaffected members of the underbelly of the ruling political party in the Dail, Fianna Fáil.
It mattered little that McCormick’s own motivation was apolitical.
He just wanted revenge and he really did not care if he lived or died a minute longer than he needed; providing he lived long enough to see justice done. There would never be any solution to the ‘Irish Question’ while the English propped up the supposedly ‘Loyalist’ majority in the ‘minority’ six counties of Ireland. The RUC had not even bothered to investigate his wife’s murder. The Redcaps, the British Army’s Royal Military Police had tried to ‘look into it’ but the local Garrison Commander had quickly put a stop to that ‘nonsense’.
It did not do to upset the Protestants!
Never had two communities been so divided by the love of the same allegedly merciful God!
He did not know the names or the addresses of the cowards who had murdered his pregnant wife; but he knew where to find the people who had sent the British Army to Ulster to protect those bastards.
Vengeance will be mine sayeth the Lord…
Chapter 18
The Director General of MI5 was fuming with barely concealed outrage. He had been summoned back from Belfast at the whim of the latest chinless wonder to sit in the Home Secretary’s chair and he did not care for Roy Jenkins’s attitude.
Sir Roger Hollis, the fifty-eight year old third son of the Bishop of Taunton had been Director General of MI5 since 1956. Educated at Leeds Grammar School and Clifton College in Bristol, he had gone down four terms before he took his finals at Worcester College Oxford and joined Barclays Bank. Later he had worked as a journalist for the Shanghai Post, working in Hong Kong before finding a convivial niche with British American Tobacco between 1928 and 1936. Invalided back to Europe with tuberculosis he had unsuccessfully applied for a post with the London Times. Espionage was not, therefore, by any means his first choice of profession and there was a distinct oddness about his past career that was finally threatening to undermine his long tenure as Director General of MI5.
It was only after he had been thwarted in his efforts to resume his career in journalism in the mid-1930s that he had employed the good offices of an Army friend to apply first for a position with MI5, and when he was rejected, for MI6 with the same negative result. Such was the belated and decidedly inauspicious beginning to what eventually, after these false starts, would prove to be a brilliant career. However, the fact was that he would probably never have gained admittance to the secret world of the intelligence services had he not encountered Jane Sissmore, MI5’s first female officer and since 1929 the Head of the Security Service’s Russian Desk.
They had met by chance at a tennis party.
It was Jane Sissmore, who had joined MI5 as a clerk in 1915, qualified as a barrister in her spare time and been called to the Bar in 1924 while working as a full time intelligence officer, who had eventually finessed Roger Hollis’s path entry into the MI5 in 1937. Hollis soon became Jane Sissmore’s deputy and by the 1939 he had become a fixture in the small pre-war service. If he had been fortunate to gain admittance to MI5 in the first place, his first major advancement and in retrospect, the key promotion of his career that did the most to propel him to the top of the service was fortuitous rather than earned. It happened that he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to take advantage of his boss’s fall from grace. In November 1940 Jane — now Jane Archer since she had married John Archer a RAF officer who would later be killed in action in 1943, on 2nd September 1939, the day after Hitler invaded Poland — was sacked for ‘insubordination’.