Scoundrel

“I want more than bombs.” He paused. A catspaw of wind skittered over the harbor and whipped his cigarette smoke toward the shore. “What’s wrong with the Russian ground-to-air missiles that Libya supplied to the IRA?” he suddenly asked me.

“As I understand,” I said, “they’re too slow to accelerate, which gives the British helicopters time to drop decoy flares. Also their range is not very great and their launchers are too heavy, which makes them awkward to move about. They’re also unreliable, sometimes they don’t fire at all.”

“But even such an unsatisfactory missile, if it works, could destroy a jumbo jet as it climbed away from London Airport?”

Christ in his benighted heaven, I thought, but I dared not show my horror. Instead I just nodded. “Oh, sure, yes.”

“If it was fired from close to the airport? Maybe from a house nearby? Or from a parked truck? Is there a suitable launching place for such a missile? You have surely been to London Airport?” Il Hayaween’s questions sounded so banal, but evil so often did.

“I’m sure it’s feasible,” I said, and tried to sound enthusiastic.

“You’re saying there is such a launching place?” he insisted.

“There is, yes.” I was thinking of the industrial estates not far from Heathrow’s runways, and I imagined a rocket streaking up from a roofless truck to tear an engine from a jetliner’s wing and bring the great machine down to explode in sliding horror on the ground. “There are plenty of suitable places,” I said equably.

“Then I shall tell your Chief of Staff that a Jewish or a British jumbo jet would be an acceptable gift in exchange for all the weapons we’ve donated to your revolution. And I can say that an expert opinion tells me that such an attack is feasible, yes?”

“Oh, indeed yes,” I said warmly, though I doubted that the Army Council of the Provisional IRA would listen to my expert opinion. It was not that such men were squeamish about civilian deaths, indeed the visionary structure of their new Ireland was built on the graves of such dead, but men like Brendan Flynn were exquisitely sensitive to the effects of bad publicity in the United States, and they knew only too well that even a handful of slaughtered American airline passengers might cause a fatal dose of realism to infect the American-Irish. The dollars of American supporters had dwindled over the years, but they were not so paltry that anyone in Belfast or Dublin would willingly abandon those donations.

“You have been very helpful to me,” il Hayaween said with an awkward and seemingly unaccustomed courtesy, and I wondered why a man of his satanic reputation was taking the trouble to condescend to me, and I decided that it was a symptom of the real disaster threatening Iraq’s world terror plans. Il Hayaween’s reputation was threatened by dissension from Syria and Iran, maybe even Libya was having second thoughts about Iraq’s chances of victory, but he would not give up. He would press on to the bitter end, dreaming of airliners exploding, of all the undeserving dead whose corpses might balance the injustices of history.

Moments later a trawler crept across the harbor’s outer bar and anchored just inside the sheltering sandbank. She carried no flag and bore no identifying number on her bows, but il Hayaween confirmed that she was the vessel carrying the gold. I hoisted Corsaire’s anchor, went alongside the ancient, rusting fishing boat and put Gerry and Liam to work carrying the heavy bags of coin from one ship to the other. As the first bags arrived I cleared Corsaire’s cabin sole and lifted her floorboards to reveal the empty belly of the boat, which looked like an elongated fiberglass bowl studded with the chunky bolts holding her massive lead-filled keel in place. It was into that long bowl-like trough that we poured the gold coins, settling Corsaire even deeper into the water as the extra thousand pounds of ballast chinked into her shallow belly.

It took two hours to make the transfer. We needed no special precautions to hide our activities for there was no possibility of interference from the Tunisian authorities, but even so the trawler’s crew seemed relieved when their job was done. Perhaps it was il Hayaween’s baleful presence that unnerved them, or maybe it was the Uzi sub-machine-guns that his two bodyguards openly carried. Whatever, as soon as he decently could, the trawler’s skipper put back to sea.

Il Hayaween satisfied himself that the coins had been bedded down in Corsaire’s bilge. “They will be well hidden?”

“I’ve hidden a score of cargoes this way,” I reassured him. “I’ll glass the gold into the boat and no one will be able to tell the new floor from the old.”

“You promise?”

“I promise. Isn’t that why you’re using me? Because I’m good at this sort of thing? So stop worrying.”

“I am paid to worry,” he said, then snapped his fingers to summon his two bodyguards. Once they had reached the cockpit he held out his hands for their two sub-machine-guns. “These are for your crew.” He laid the guns down on the cockpit thwarts.

“Not for me?” I asked jocularly.

“Your job is to hide the gold and carry it to America. Their job is to guard it.” By which he meant that their job was to guard me. “Throw the guns overboard before you reach Miami,” he ordered Gerry and Liam.

“We will, sir, we will.” Even though there was nothing extraordinary in il Hayaween’s looks or manner, Gerry still seemed to realize that the Palestinian was a very Archangel of Satan while he himself, like his friend Liam, was at best only a minor imp.

“If you fail me,” il Hayaween said to the three of us, “then I shall pursue you to the last hiding place on earth, and when I find you I shall kill you, but not quickly, not quickly at all.” He grimaced at us, perhaps meaning it to be a smile, then turned toward the fisherman’s boat that had been summoned from the quay. None of us moved as he clambered over the gunwale. I was wondering how many men, women and children il Hayaween had killed. He raised his maimed hand in a gesture of farewell as the fisherman poled the bright-painted wooden skiff back to the quay.

I put Gerry and Liam to work again. I inflated Corsaire’s dinghy and sent Gerry ashore to collect buckets of fine sand that I poured to fill the voids between the gold coins. Then, when the sand and gold were riddled firm and smoothed over so that their top surface was a shallow reflection of the original curve of the bilge, I covered the mixture with layers of glassfiber mat and cloth strips. Liam helped me, but his capacity for even such a simple task was short-lived. “It’s focking boring,” he complained to me, then retreated to the cockpit where he lit a cigarette and stared balefully at the gray-green harbor water.

I finished the job myself; first mixing the resin and its foul-smelling hardener, then brushing the mixed liquid on to the prepared fiber mat. That job done I went back to the cockpit to wait as the fiberglass hardened and dried. I made idle chatter with Liam and Gerry, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was being struck by the sheer amateurishness of this operation. How was it, with all the resources of Iraq and the Palestinians behind us, and with the cunning and practice of the IRA at our side, we were still reduced to this laborious method of smuggling gold? And were these two sour boys the best guardians that the IRA could find? And was Corsaire the most reliable transport at Iraq’s disposal?

“What are you thinking, mister?” Gerry flicked a cigarette butt into the water.

“I’m thinking that the resin should be dry soon,” I lied.

As darkness fell I mixed the white gelcoat with its hardener and brushed it on to the cabin sole. By midnight the new work had dried hard and the gold was thus hidden beneath a false floor. The white of the new floor was not the exact same shade as the rest of Corsaire’s interior fiberglass, but the new work would be hidden by the cabin flooring and any searcher might conclude that the shallow bilge had been left with a deliberately rough and discolored finish simply because it was out of sight. I laid down the wooden sole, covered it with the saloon carpet, then hoisted Corsaire’s anchor. I used a flashlight to steer a cautious course across the shallows of the harbor entrance until, at last, clear of the bar and with the weight of the gold making her even more sluggish than before, Corsaire plunged her bows into a short hard wave and made Liam dive for the starboard gunwale. His gun clattered on to the cockpit’s teak grating as he retched miserably into the sea.

I raised the yacht’s sails, shut off her motor, and took my ramshackle enterprise into the night.