Sam McCready sat back in his chair, as far as the upright chair would permit him, and allowed them to drone on. They were talking about him as if he had already become a piece of furniture, something from the past, a discussion point to muse upon during the serving of the port at the club.
He looked out at the bright blue sky of the summer day beyond the windows. There was a whole world out there, another world, one that he would soon have to join and in which he would have to make his way without the membership of his own small peer group, the intelligence officers among whom he had lived for most of his adult life.
He thought of his wife. If she had still been alive, he would have wanted to retire with her, find a small cottage by the sea in Devon or Cornwall. He had sometimes dreamed of his own small fishing boat, bobbing in a stone-walled harbor, safe from the winter gales, waiting to be taken out on a summer’s sea to bring home a supper of cod or plaice or slick, gleaming mackerel.
In his dream he would have been just Mr. McCready from the house above the harbor, or Sam, when taking his beer in the snug of the local inn with the fishermen and crabbers of the town. It was just a dream,
of course, that had come to him sometimes in the dark, rain-swept alleys of Czechoslovakia or Poland as he waited for a “meet” or watched a dead-letter box to see if it had been staked out, before he moved close to reach for the message inside.
But May was gone, and he was alone in the world, cocooned only by the camaraderie of that smallest of small worlds, the other men who had chosen to serve their countries and spend their lives in the shadowed places where destruction came not in a blaze of glory but in the flash of a torch in the face and the rasp of soldiers’ boots on cobbles. He had survived them all, but he knew he would not survive the mandarins.
Besides, he would be lonely living all alone down in the southwest, far away from the other old war horses who drank their gins in the Special Forces Club at the end of Herbert Crescent. Like most men who had spent their lives in the Service, he was a loner at heart and made new friends uneasily, like an old dog fox preferring the coverts he knew to the open plain.
“I mean simply,” Timothy Edwards was saying, “that the days of slipping into and out of East Germany are a thing of the past. This October, East Germany will actually cease to exist—even today it exists only in name. Relations with the USSR have changed out of all recognition; there will be no more defectors, just honored guests—”
“Bloody hell,” thought McCready, “he really has fallen for that one. And what happens, dickbrain, when the famine strikes Moscow and the hard men close in on the embattled Mikhail Gorbachev? Never mind, you’ll see.”
He let his attention drift and thought of his son. He was a good boy, a fine lad, just out of college and wanting to be an architect. Good for him. He had a pretty blond girlfriend living with him—they all seemed to do that nowadays—no need for the pretty girl to have security clearance. And Dan came around to see him now and again. That was nice. But the boy had a life of his own, a career to head for, friendships to make, places to go and see, and he hoped they would be brighter, safer places than the ones he had seen.
He wished he had spent more time with his son when he was small, wished he had had the time to roll on the sitting-room carpet and read him bedtime stories. Too often, he had left that to May because he had been away on some godforsaken border, staring at the barbed wire, waiting for his agent to come crawling through, or listening for the klaxons that would mean the man would never be seen again.
There was so much he had missed, and so many things he had done, and seen, and places he had been that he could not really discuss with the young man who still called him Dad.
“I am most grateful, Timothy, for your suggestion, which, in a way, preempted my own.”
Denis Gaunt was doing a good job, making the bastards listen, growing in confidence as he spoke. He was a good man, a Head Office man really, but good.
“Because,” Gaunt went on, “Sam here realizes just as well as any of us that we cannot dwell in the past, chewing over the Cold War all over again. The point is, there are other menaces that threaten our country and that are on the increase. Proliferation of high-tech weaponry to highly unstable tyrants in the Third World—we all know exactly what France has been selling Iraq—and of course terrorism.
“In that regard”—he took a buff folder from the Records clerk and opened it—“let me remind you of the affair that began in April 1986 and ended, if indeed the Irish question will ever end, in the late spring of 1987. Such affairs will probably happen again, and it will be the Finn’s task to head them off—again. Get rid of Sam McCready? Frankly, gentlemen, that could be very foolish.”
The Controllers for Western Hemisphere and Domestic Operations nodded, while Edwards glowered at them. This was the sort of agreement he did not need. But Gaunt was bland as he read out the events on April 1986 that had triggered the case that took up most of the spring of 1987.
“ ‘On April 16,1986, fighters from American carriers in the Gulf of Sirte and fighter-bombers flying from British bases blasted the private living quarters of Colonel Qaddafi outside Tripoli. The good Colonel’s sleeping area was hit by a fighter flying from the USS Exeter, call-sign Iceman Four.
“ ‘Qaddafi survived, but he had a nervous breakdown. When he recovered he vowed vengeance, just as much on Britain as upon America, because we had allowed the F-111 strike bombers to fly out of our bases at Upper Heyford and Lakenheath.
“ ‘In the early spring of 1987 we learned how Qaddafi intended to extract that revenge upon Britain, and the case was given to Sam McCready. ...’ ”
A Casualty Of War
Chapter 1
Father Dermot O’Brien received the message from Libya by the normal route for such first communications—by mail.
It was a perfectly ordinary letter, and had anyone opened it—which they had not, because the Republic of Ireland does not intercept mail—they would have found nothing of interest in it. The postmark said that it came from Geneva, as indeed it had, and the return address indicated the writer worked for the World Council of Churches, which he did not.
Father O’Brien found it in his pigeonhole in the main hall beside the refectory one morning in the early spring of 1987 as he emerged from taking his breakfast. He glanced through the other four letters addressed to him, but his gaze returned to the one from Geneva. It bore the slight pencil mark on the rear flap that told him it should not be opened in public or left lying around.
The priest nodded amiably to two colleagues about to enter the refectory and went back to his bedroom on the first floor.
The letter had been typed on the usual onionskin airmail paper. The text was warm and friendly, beginning “My dear Dermot ... ,” and was written in the tone of one old friend involved in pastoral work to another. Even though the World Council of Churches is a Protestant organization, no casual observer would have seen anything strange in a Lutheran clergyman writing to a friend who happened to be a Catholic priest. These were the days of cautious ecumenism, especially in the international field.
The friend in Geneva wished him well, trusted he was in good health and chatted about the work of the WCC in the Third World. The meat was in the third paragraph of the script. The writer said that his bishop recalled with pleasure a previous meeting with Father O’Brien and would be delighted to meet him again. The signoff was simply, “Your good friend Harry.”
Father O’Brien laid the letter down thoughtfully and gazed from his window across the green fields of County Wicklow toward Bray and, beyond it, the gray waters of the Irish Sea. The waters were hidden by the roll of the hills, and even the spires of Bray were dim and distant from the old manor house at Sandymount that contained the headquarters of his Order. But the sun shone brightly on the green meadows that he loved so dearly, as dearly indeed as he hated the great enemy that lay beyond the sea.
The letter intrigued him. It had been so long, almost two years, since he had visited Tripoli for a personal audience with Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the Great Leader of the Libyan Jamahariya, Keeper of Allah’s Word, the man referred to as “the bishop” in the letter.