“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m not Arab, Jewish, or British.”
“I think they’ll slaughter each other,” she said in a soft voice as she looked out at the buildings on the hillside, their rock houses blending into the land as if they were natural formations.
“The Red Hand is already slaughtering Catholics,” I reminded her.
“Only a few. It would be more if the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army weren’t containing them. Can you imagine Northern Ireland if the English gave it up? There would be a bloodbath.”
“Churchill did offer to give it up, you said.”
“Aye, but he knew de Valera would never accept. The Irish don’t want another war so soon after the last ones. Thousands fought in the Great War then lived through the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War. It was enough.”
“But not for you. You’re in uniform.”
“I have my reasons,” she said, leafing through the folder again.
“Where are you from? How did you end up in England?”
“That’s not important. You need to focus on where you’re going. When you land, someone will meet you and take you to the 5th Division headquarters in Newcastle. The Ballykinler depot is in their area. They will have been alerted to your arrival and will provide whatever logistical support you need. It’s all in your paperwork.”
With that, it was all business for the rest of the thirty miles to the RAF air base. She gave me my travel orders, joint ones from U.S. and British commands authorizing my investigation, instructions allowing me to draw supplies and transport, just the sort of paperwork any commanding officer hates to be presented with by a mere lieutenant. I wasn’t going to Northern Ireland to make friends.
“Here are copies of reports on the theft from the police and military investigations,” she said as she handed me a thick envelope of paperwork when the staff car stopped near a hangar. “The name of the RUC detective you’ll be working with is in one of them. You should see him as soon as possible.”
“I have to work with an Orangeman?”
“Of course. His name is Hugh Carrick. He’s a district inspector in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.”
“What do I do if and when I—I mean this Orangeman and I—find the weapons?”
“Don’t worry. Major Cosgrove and I will be joining you in a few days. We can organize enough troops to take them back.”
“What if they’re in the Republic?”
“The Republic of Ireland doesn’t want the IRA on the loose with fifty BARs any more than we do.”
I took the paperwork, grabbed my pack, and got out of the car. Then I leaned in and tried one more time.
“Sláine, you’re asking me to risk my life and possibly betray my countrymen, no matter how misguided they may be. Don’t you think you owe it to me to tell me how you came to work for MI-5? Most Irish I know, no matter which side of the fence they’re on, would call you a traitor.” I waited for the word to take hold, to light a fire hot enough to explode into a reaction. She turned her face to me. It was flushed a bit, but she was a fair-skinned Irish lass in a burning hot climate, so it could have been from the heat.
“And what will they call you, Billy Boyle, when all is said and done?”
I LOST TRACK of the hours, even the day. I had started off in a Bristol Beaufighter, cramped in the single seat behind the pilot, for a short hop to Alexandria, where I switched to an RAF Sunderland Flying Boat to Malta, where it refueled, made another stop at Gibraltar, then began the long flight over the Atlantic, arcing out as far as possible from the German fighter bases along the coast of France.
The Sunderland was like a flying house. It had a wardroom, a small stove, bunks, and even a washroom. I drank, I read, I slept, but mostly I wondered. What was Diana doing now? Had she come to her senses and given up on the SOE mission? Or was she on a ship or a plane somewhere, launched with doubtful chances of survival?
I held an empty mug cupped in my hand, the sweet tea warming my stomach, as I watched the sun rise over the North Atlantic. Gray clouds brightened and I looked for the first sight of land. The sea below was dark and choppy, and I realized this was the stretch of water my grandfather must have steamed across on his way to America, heading west with Ireland at his young back. He’d come to America alone at the age of eleven, the last survivor in his family of the Great Hunger. His uncle, also alone after the death of his entire family, had saved enough to send Granddad Liam off in steerage with a loaf of bread, a few coins in his pocket, and a note pinned to the inside of his jacket.
Did he regret anything he left behind? Did he worry as he watched the waves beneath him, unable to fathom what America might be like? I felt the pull of the familiar as I waited for the unknown to reveal itself. And I missed Diana. It was a pure longing, separate from the fight we’d had, but tangled up in it nonetheless. What I felt was desire for her and an unselfish wish for everything good for her. What I thought, instead of felt, stirred up angry notions of how she’d ruined everything. Did Granddad weep or feel joy, I wondered, as Ireland fell away and the unknown land drew closer?
“Watch off to starboard, Lieutenant,” the navigator said as he opened the wardroom door. “We’ll make the cliffs of Donegal in a few minutes.”
“Thanks,” I said, pressing my face against the window as streaks of moisture raced across it. We were descending, beneath the clouds now, where the sunlight shone brightly on the crests of rolling waves. I wondered how my grandfather, crammed into the hold of an old wooden ship, had endured the voyage in steerage, and how many times he’d read that note.
I knew it by heart. When he was alive, he would take it out and read it on his birthday. My dad kept up the tradition, with all the family gathered around. He would remove the paper from the family Bible, where he kept it folded in the book of Exodus. He handled it carefully, afraid that smoothing it out too much would brush away the lines traced by a pencil stub in the middle of the last century. Then he would clear his throat, take a sip of whiskey, and read.
Never forget your name is Liam O’Baoighill, and you were born in
County Roscommon. Your father, my dear brother, was named Patrick,
your mother Cliona. Never forget the English took our farms and let
your parents, brothers, and sisters starve. I know this. I earned your
passage working at the Galway docks, loading freighters with sacks of
grain, firkins of butter, barrels of barley, sacks of lard, ham, and bacon.
British soldiers guarded the ships until they set sail. Such are the men
who rule our land. Grow strong in America. You or your sons, or their
sons, must one day return to smite them. God indeed gave us the
potato blight, but the English gave us this famine.
His accusation and admonition had struck deep in our hearts, and as a child I learned to hate the red-coated British soldiers I conjured up in my mind, bayonets at the ready, guarding food being shipped to England while poor Cliona and her children starved to death.
By the time my father and his two brothers, Frank and Daniel, went off to fight in France in 1917, Granddad was dead. And a good thing too, Uncle Dan always said, that he did not have to suffer the sight of his three boys going off to fight for the English, and only two of them returning, with poor Frank, the oldest, left in a grave on the outskirts of a village called Chateau-Thierry.
Dad and Uncle Dan came home to a hero’s welcome, but they never thought it fitting. While they were mustered out, the IRA was fighting the English for a free Ireland, and they felt no elation in having helped England keep its empire. They joined Clan na Gael, raising money for the cause, and taking in IRA men on the run. Some of them, according to the stories, were from the Squad, Michael Collins’s assassins who targeted British intelligence officers throughout Ireland.
Uncle Dan’s involvement went deeper. When raising money through Clan na Gael wasn’t enough for him, he secretly became an IRA man. But it seemed to me that with the IRA, secrets were meant to be bragged about to those you trusted. Uncle Dan came to the house after he’d been sworn in as a member of the North American IRA, and told us all about it. Mom was worried, and said maybe he joined because he didn’t have a wife and kids to keep him from storing guns in the cellar and inviting hard men with cloth caps pulled down over their faces to sleep on his couch whenever they pleased. Dad listened, and stayed with Clan na Gael. They both rose in the ranks of the Boston PD, they and their buddies doing what they could for the Cause, turning a blind eye when they needed to. Sláine O’Brien thought this was keeping a wound from healing but in my family, a wrong still demanded righting, a silent hand from the past reminding us of it every year.
For the first time since Granddad’s uncle had charged him and his descendants with the duty of smiting the English for their crimes, a Boyle was returning to Ireland. On a British aircraft, working for the British, against the IRA. I hoped Granddad Liam wasn’t watching and weeping for what had become of his clan. What would he make of Sláine O’Brien, working for British counterintelligence? What did I make of her? What secrets, if any, drove her to wear the British uniform?
I felt the Sunderland descend and saw the tall, sharp cliffs of Donegal, the sea raging against them. We went lower, and the green fields of Ireland appeared, distant patchworks of foggy emerald that gave me no joy at all. Sunlight danced on lakes, and as we flew over the largest, Lough Neagh, I saw Belfast to the north, a sprawl of smokestacks and industry fronting the Irish Sea. The plane banked south, headed for a landing in Dundrum Bay, an inlet close to Newcastle, where I was to report to 5th Division headquarters. I shivered as the damp chill seemed to rise from the ground and penetrate the metal skin of the flying boat, and I made a mental note to ditch my tropical khakis for a good thick woolen uniform.
The Sunderland slowed as Dundrum Bay came closer, rushing up at the last second, and finally it
thumped
once, then twice, before settling into the water and easing up on the props until it chugged along, almost quietly, to a long dock built out into the bay. As soon as the engines shut down, a small boat motored out and pulled up to the main hatchway up front. As I got in, an old gray-bearded fellow revved the small engine and headed for the dock.
“Welcome to Ireland,” he said. “There’s some who are in a hurry for your company.”
“I’m a popular guy,” I said as I extended my hand. “Billy Boyle.”
“Grady O’Brick I am,” he said. We shook, and I couldn’t help but notice the old man had no fingernails to speak of. The tips of his fingers were thin, with rutted scar tissue where the nails had once been.
“You’re Catholic then, by the sound of your name.”
“Aye, as are you. You have the look of the altar boy about you. Mind how you go here, lad.”
“Where?”
He only nodded toward the dock as he eased up on the motor and gently brought the boat alongside as he leaned close and spoke softly. “If you find yourself in Clough, at the head of the bay, stop in the Lug o’ the Tub Pub. Most nights you’ll find old Grady there.”
I started to climb onto the dock. “Lieutenant Boyle?” The question came from a GI as he offered me a hand.
“That’s me,” I said. I took his hand and hoisted myself up. The old man was busy tying up his lines and paid me no mind.
The GI was an MP sergeant dressed in a wool overcoat with a white helmet, white leggings, and a white web belt, all bright and gleaming. It wasn’t hard to figure out why GIs called MPs snowdrops.
“Sergeant Patterson, sir. I’m here to take you to the Newcastle area.”
“OK, Sergeant,” I said as we walked off the narrow dock to his jeep. “After I present myself at division HQ, I’ll need to find your quartermaster.”
“I’m not supposed to take you to headquarters, Lieutenant. The provost marshal himself gave me orders to bring you to him.” He took my pack and threw it in the back of the jeep. I pulled my light jacket tight as I climbed in. The canvas cover didn’t do much to keep out the chill, which seemed to match my greeting.
“And where is he?”
“Near Newcastle. We’re set up in an old factory building. Gives us space for prisoners.”
“This provost marshal, is he your CO?”
“No, that’s Lieutenant Burnham, he’s the CO of the MP Platoon, 5th Division. Captain Heck is the provost marshal in charge of all military police in Ireland.”
“Northern Ireland,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Patterson, are you Irish?”
“I’m American, Lieutenant. I don’t bother much with all that old country stuff.”
“OK, but just remember this is Northern Ireland, which belongs to Great Britain. The Republic of Ireland is a free country.”
“England’s a free country too, ain’t it, Lieutenant? Ain’t that what we’re fighting for?”
“Forget it. Tell me why Captain Heck wants to see me. And what the heck kind of name is that anyway?” I had to laugh at my own joke. Patterson didn’t.
“Look, sir, Captain Heck don’t like jokes. About anything. And about his name even less.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Hiram. Hiram Heck.” He couldn’t keep a straight face. “Beats the heck outta me why he wants to see you.” He laughed at his joke, and I was polite enough to join in.
“I can see why he doesn’t like to be kidded about his name. Do you know why I’m here, Sergeant?”
“To get your ass chewed out by Captain Heck, Lieutenant. Other than that, no one told me anything.”
We drove along a coast road with a beach to our left. A stiff breeze came off it and Patterson pulled on a pair of woolen gloves. I stuck my hands in my armpits and tried not to shiver. Ahead of us mountains loomed in the distance, their peaks hidden by mist and fog. Tucked beneath them, along the curving shore, was a town. The larger buildings featured black slate roofs and orange brickwork, while the smaller homes and shops were painted pastel shades of blue, green, and yellow. Sheep grazed on the fields to our right, each holding enclosed by a gray stone wall. The sea and the land were beautiful, blues and greens as vibrant as the cold sunlight could make them. But it was the mountains that held my eyes. These, I knew from the map of Ireland I’d had pinned to my bedroom wall growing up, were the Mountains of Mourne, the place from which, according to the legends, Saint Patrick had banished snakes from Ireland.
Patterson pulled a hard right and the peaceful scenery gave way to rows of tightly packed houses, some rundown shops, and a junkyard. A few hundred yards beyond them, he turned onto a side road and parked the jeep in front of a cinderblock building with a corrugated tin roof and loading dock off to the side. It looked like the kind of place in which a Boston mobster could take his time fitting a pair of cement overshoes onto an unlucky guest.
“Here we are, Lieutenant. Let’s not keep Holy Heck waiting.”
IT WAS A big room, and cold. Cold like any concrete-and-cinderblock building in a damp, wet climate, the chill climbing through the soles of your feet while your teeth were performing an echoing chatter. I was tired and grimy, still wearing the same lightweight uniform I’d put on in Jerusalem, and I didn’t like being rousted like some criminal and pulled in for questioning. Grady O’Brick’s warning played in my mind. Was a guy who had lost his fingernails somewhere along the line worth taking advice from?
Patterson pointed me to the far end of the room, where a small stove gave off a glow. Two officers who stared at me didn’t. The guy on the right had to be Captain Hiram Heck. He was hogging the warmth and wore a jeep coat, a warm, wool-lined waterproof garment that was in high demand for cold nights at the front but always seemed to be in short supply until you saw rear-area officers looking important and warm in them. Heck was tall, rail thin but not weak, muscle and bone, not much else. His beak nose traced an arc from his eyebrows to his upper lip. He stood with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels, his feet encased in highly polished, dark brown paratrooper boots. Behind him stood a lieutenant, a less elegantly dressed straightleg. Burnham, I thought, the MP Platoon leader. Two desks were arranged on either side of the stove, close to the heat. A filing cabinet and a pinup of Veronica Lake completed the furnishings.
“Lieutenant William Boyle reporting, sir,” I said as soon as I was close enough to smell his aftershave. I saluted crisply, a proper junior officer. It made Heck respond to me, and I could see it threw him off. He liked that pose of his. He knew his height worked for him, so I got close to show I took no notice.
Heck reluctantly unclasped his hands and tossed off a salute. “At ease, Boyle,” he said in a voice that sounded like a rasp on metal. “You look like a bum. What the hell are you dressed for?”
“My apologies, sir. I just traveled from the Mediterranean and haven’t drawn supplies yet. I know I look disgraceful, especially to a paratrooper.”
Burnham’s eyes were ready to pop out. He shook his head in a friendly warning, but I decided it would be more fun
not
to mind how I went.
“What on God’s green earth are you talking about, Boyle?”
“You, sir. You must be a paratrooper. Those are jump boots, right? And your trousers are bloused. That’s the sign of a paratrooper. At the front, no one except the real McCoy would ever dress like that. Where’d you get your wings, Captain Heck?”