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When the British first learned of this, they were not slow to catch up. It was once said that the most important thing an English gentleman ever learns is precisely when to stop being one.
So the British bug the coffins.
On the night before the funeral at Ballycrane, two Special Air Service soldiers, acting under cover in civilian clothes, broke into the funeral parlor where the empty coffin stood waiting for the morrow. The body, in Irish tradition, was still laid out in the family’s front parlor down the street. One of the soldiers was an electronics expert, the other a skilled French polisher and carpenter. Within an hour they implanted the bug in the woodwork of the coffin. It would have a short life, since before noon the next day it would be under six feet of earth.
From their deep cover on a hillside above the village the next day, the SAS soldiers kept watch on the funeral, photographing every face present with a camera whose lens resembled a bazooka tube. Another man monitored the sounds emanating from the device in the wood of the coffin as it came through the village street and into the church. The device recorded the entire funeral service, and the soldiers watched the coffin re-emerge and move toward the open grave.
The priest, his cassock billowing in the morning breeze, intoned the last words and scattered a little earth on the coffin as it went down. The sound of the earth hitting the woodwork caused the listening soldier to wince, it was so loud. Above the open grave, Father Dermot O’Brien stood beside a man known by the British to be the deputy Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council. Heads down, lips hidden, they began to mutter.
What they said went onto the tape on the hillside. From there it went to Lurgan, thence to Aldergrove airport, and thence to London. It had been only a routine operation, but it had come up with pure gold. Father O’Brien had reported to the Army Council the full details of Colonel Qaddafi’s offer.
“How much?” asked Sir Anthony, the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, two days later in London.
“Twenty tons, Tony. That’s the offer.”
The Director General of MI-5 closed the file that his colleagues had just finished reading and returned it to his briefcase. The actual tape was not present. Sir Anthony was a busy man; a written synopsis was all he needed.
The tape had been with MI-5 in London for over a day, and they had been working fast. The sound quality, inevitably, had not been good. For one thing, the bugging device had been straining to hear the words through half a centimeter of wood, and it was being lowered downward into the grave as the conversation began. For another, there were extraneous sounds: the wailing of the young terrorist’s mother nearby, the rustle of the brisk wind across the open grave and through the priest’s flowing robes,
the crack of the IRA honor guard in black balaclava woolen masks firing three rounds of blanks into the air.
A radio producer would have thought the tape a mess. But this tape was never intended for broadcast. Moreover, the technology of electronic sound-enhancement is very advanced. Carefully, sound engineers had phased out the background noises, “lifting” the spoken words into a different frequency mode and separating them from everything else. The voices of the officiating priest and the Army Council man beside him would never win prizes for elocution, but what they had said was clear enough.
“And the conditions?” asked Sir Anthony. “No doubt about them?”
“None,” said the DG. “Within the twenty tons will be the usual machine guns, rifles, grenades, launchers, mortars, pistols, timers, and bazookas—probably the Czech RPG-7. Plus two metric tons of Semtex-H. Of this, half must be used for a bombing campaign on mainland Britain, to include selective assassinations, including that of the American ambassador. Apparently the Libyans were very insistent on that.”
“Bobby, I want you to take it all to the SIS,” said Sir Anthony at last. “No interservice rivalry, if you please. Total cooperation, all the way. It looks as if this will be an overseas operation—their pigeon. From Libya right up to some godforsaken bay on the coast of Ireland, it’ll be a foreign operation. I want you to give them your absolute cooperation, from you downward.”
“No question,” said the DG. “They’ll have it.”
Before nightfall, the Chief of the SIS and his Deputy Timothy Edwards attended a full and lengthy briefing at the Curzon Street headquarters of their sister service. Exceptionally, the Chief was prepared to admit that he could, in part, corroborate the Ulster information from the report of the Libyan doctor. Normally, wild horses would not drag from him the slightest admission concerning SIS assets abroad, but this was not a normal situation.
He asked for, and was given, the cooperation he wanted. MI-5 would increase surveillance, both physical and electronic, on the IRA Army Council man. So long as Father O’Brien remained in the North, the same would apply to him. When he returned to the Irish Republic, the SIS would take over. Surveillance would also be doubled on the one other man mentioned in the graveside conversation, a man well known to British security forces but who had never yet been charged or imprisoned.
The Chief ordered his own networks in the Irish Republic to keep watch for the return of Father O’Brien, to tail him, and above all else, to alert London if he left by air or sea for foreign parts. A pickup would be much easier on the continent of Europe.
When he returned to Century House, the Chief summoned Sam McCready.
“Stop it, Sam,” he said finally. “Stop it at its source in Libya or in transit. Those twenty tons must not get through.”
Sam McCready sat for hours in a darkened viewing room watching the film of the funeral. As the tape played through the entire service inside the church, the camera roamed over the graveyard outside, picking up the handful of IRA guards placed there to ensure no one came near. They were all unrecognizable in black balaclava woolen masks.
When the cortege reemerged from the portico of the church to proceed to the open grave, with six masked pall-bearers carrying the coffin, McCready asked the technicians to synchronize sound and vision. Nothing remotely suspicious was said until the priest stood, his head bowed, by the grave with the IRA Army Council man beside him. The priest raised his head once to offer words of comfort to the teenager’s weeping mother.
“Freeze frame. Close-up. Enhance.”
When the face of Father O’Brien filled the screen, McCready stared at it for twenty minutes, memorizing every feature until he would know the face anywhere.
He read the transcript of the section of the tape in which the priest reported on his Libyan visit, over and over again. Later he sat alone and stared at photographs in his office.
One of the photographs was of Muammar Qaddafi, his bouffant black hair bulging from beneath his army cap, mouth half open as he spoke. Another was of Hakim al-Mansour, stepping out of a car in Paris, exquisitely tailored by Savile Row, smooth, urbane, bilingual in English, fluent in French, educated, charming, cosmopolitan, and utterly lethal. A third was the Chief of Staff, IRA Army Council, addressing a public meeting in Belfast in his other role as a law-abiding and responsible local government councilor of the Sinn Fein political party. There was a fourth picture: that of the man mentioned by the graveside as the one the Army Council would probably choose to take over and run the operation, the one Father O’Brien would have to introduce and recommend by letter to Hakim al-Mansour. The British knew he was a former commander of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade, now removed from local tasks to head up Special Projects, a very intelligent, highly experienced, and ruthless killer. His name was Kevin Mahoney.
McCready stared at the photographs for hours, trying to glean some knowledge of the brains behind the faces. If he was to win, he would have to match his mind with theirs. So far, they had the edge. They knew, presumably, not only what they were going to do, but how they were going to do it. And when. He knew the first, but not the second or the third.
He had two advantages. One, he knew what they had in mind, but they did not know he knew. And two, he could recognize them, but they did not know him. Or did al-Mansour know his face? The Libyan had worked with the KGB; the Russians knew McCready. Had they briefed the Libyan on the face of the Deceiver?
The Chief was not prepared to take the risk.