Scoundrel

keel rested on big wooden blocks. On Herlihy’s orders her new name had been painted out, making her just one more anonymous boat among the hundreds of craft stored in Washington’s boatyards during the bitter winter months.

Now, at dusk on the day which had started with Quick Colleen in Nantucket Sound, I stood where Rebel Lady had been hidden away. Rebel Lady herself had already been taken away to have her secret excised, but I had wanted to come to the boatyard to see for myself just where Saddam Hussein’s revenge on America would have been triggered.

“Shame what they did to her,” the manager said. “Wrecking an interior like that.”

“Wicked,” I agreed.

“Funny thing, though. She had a Florida manufacturer’s nameplate on her coachroof, but she wasn’t built in the States.”

“No, she wasn’t.” The real Rebel Lady, now called Roisin, waited for me in Ardgroom. I had decided I did not like that new name. I would change it back. Or find another name. Scoundrel perhaps? Then I would go and claim my boat and sail her back across the Atlantic.

“One of my guys reckoned she was French-built,” the manager told me, “but she was a hell of a lot heavier than any French boat I’ve ever seen.”

“I know. I sailed her.” That crossing of the Mediterranean seemed so long ago now. I suddenly remembered Liam’s dead eyes gleaming emerald with the reflected lamplight.

“You sailed her? So what was it all about?” the manager asked eagerly.

“Smuggling. Cocaine.” I offered him the answer which he would find most believable.

“I reckoned as much. The stuff was hidden in that big keel, eh?”

“I guess so.”

“I know so!” he said happily. “I was here when they X-rayed her. They got excited, I can tell you! Excited!” He gestured toward the vacant hard-standing where Rebel Lady had been parked and where all that was now left of her presence were abandoned keel-blocks, jackstands, and the cumbersome X-ray equipment that was used to survey the health of hidden keel-bolts. “You think we’ll be on the TV news?” the manager asked me hopefully.

I shook my head. “You don’t want to be on the evening news, believe me, not with that boat. But thank you for letting me see the place.”

“You’re welcome.” He tried to hide his disappointment. “And if you ever need boat storage in the nation’s capital, Mr.…?” He hesitated, inviting my name, but I shook my head again and walked away. It was nearly dark and the runway’s approach lights shimmered their reflections in the river’s hurrying water. A plane roared close overhead as I climbed into the back seat of the government car and slammed the door.

It had all been so close. And so clever. Whatever it was, which now, in the city’s evening traffic, I went to find out.

Rebel Lady had been taken to one of the military reservations close to Washington where, in a great empty hangar, she stood forlorn under massive bright lights. I found van Stryker in a glass-walled booth from where he intently watched the white-garbed team that worked underneath the jacked-up hull. “It’s in the lead keel,” he told me without taking his eyes off the boat and without saying what “it” was.

The huge bulbous keel had already been taken off Rebel Lady. Like most ballast keels it had been secured to the fiberglass hull by long silicon-bronze stud bolts. Van Stryker’s team had loosened the bolts and gently lowered the keel to the hangar floor. Standing beside the exposed keel, which was now hidden from my view by the men and women in their protective clothing, was a bright yellow flask as big as a compact car and decorated with the three-leaved insignia of the nuclear industry. “It was a bomb?” I asked in horror as I recognized the symbol.

“No. He doesn’t have the technology to make a bomb, not yet.” Van Stryker looked tired. His job was to preserve the republic from the attacks of terrorists and he knew just how close this attack had come to success, and now he was thinking of the other attacks that would doubtless come in the future. “Someone’s going to make the bomb, Paul, someone who thinks they can change the world in their favor by setting it off. But not this time.”

“So what is it?”

“A small sliver of Chernobyl.”

“Chernobyl?”

Van Stryker sipped at a brown plastic mug of coffee. “We think the Iraqis hollowed out that keel and filled it with around four tons of uranium-dioxide. That’s the nuclear fuel you put in ordinary commercial power station like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. They chopped the fuel rods into pellets and mixed them up with powdered aluminum and what looks like ammonium nitrate. That means they mixed the uranium into a huge firebomb. Then they added a detonator and a timer. Simple, really, and comparatively cheap.”

“And what will that lot do?”

“The firebomb would have reached a temperature of over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and once the nuclear fuel caught fire it would have spread a miniature plume of radioactivity just like the Chernobyl plume.” Van Stryker offered me a sudden sympathetic glance. “Don’t worry, Paul, my experts say you probably weren’t exposed to excessive radiation. By sheathing that horror in lead and keeping it under water they gave you protection. Then you made yourself even safer by piling the gold on top.”

I stared at the white-dressed figures. “What would the bomb have done to Washington?”

“If the wind had been southerly then their toxic bonfire might have made the Pentagon untenable for years to come, or even the White House. What a revenge for Baghdad that would have been.” Van Stryker fell silent for a few seconds. “Think of a city contaminated with radioactive isotopes; strontium and caesium. Think of the birth- defects, think of the cancers. That’s why they wanted the boat out of the water when the detonator triggered, so the fire could start properly. If she’d been floating it would have been snuffed out and at best just contaminated a few miles of river, but on dry land, and with a good wind, they might have smeared a hundred square miles with lethal poisons.”

“This wasn’t the IRA’s doing, you know that?” I told van Stryker.

“Your IRA,” he said flatly, “was the only organization to support Saddam Hussein with bombs. Don’t make excuses for terrorism. Don’t try to tell me they’re just misled heroes.”

“I just said…”

“I heard you what you said, Paul, and I understand your mixed loyalties.” He stared at the bright arc lights and the busy men and the bright yellow flask. “Did you know that when George Washington couldn’t find uniforms for his men he made them place scraps of white paper in their hats? He was saying, these are my warriors, these are your targets. He didn’t hide them, he didn’t send them home to hide behind women’s skirts at day’s end. He was a man.”

I said nothing, but just stared at Rebel Lady. A rope’s bitter end hung from her gunwale and I wondered if she would ever sail again. I doubted it, and I thought how unfair to a boat that her last voyage should be under such false pretences. She deserved one last romp through high seas with full sail and no unfair ballast slowing her down.

“The Garda arrested Flynn this afternoon,” van Stryker said.

“Will you extradite him?”

“No. The less the public know about this, the better. Nuclear matters seem to bring out the most hysterical aspects of the American people so I shall try very hard to keep all this secret. But Flynn will be taught that Uncle Sam is not easily mocked. The Garda will find something with which to charge him, and a few years in Portlaoise Jail should teach him to respect us.”

“And Herlihy?”

Van Stryker shook his head. “There’s too many lawyers round him to make a trumped-up charge stick, but I think the Internal Revenue Service could be persuaded to make his life a misery.”

“And what of me?” I asked.

“On the whole,” he said, “You’ve been on the side of the angels. We’ll give you some back pay, Paul. Say a