The Glory Boys

FOUR

A city is a vulnerable, flaccid target for an act of terrorism.

Huge and preoccupied and indifferent — the ideal hunting ground, and never more so than if the stalkers are a small, motivated group of men whose numbers can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In time of war a city can be mobilized, organized and put into uniform with specific tasks to perform. But when peace reigns it absorbs the danger, turns the other cheek, has too much with which to concern itself to be agitated by the tiny cancer flowing at will in its body.

The Provisional IRA proved conclusively how defenceless is a great international capital. One hundred and forty-eight bombs in twenty-two months and the mighty carcase barely knew it was under attack. Cars packed with gelignite disintegrating among shopping crowds, duffle-bags exploding on busy railway platforms, mutilated bodies ferried away in fleets of ambulances. But the next time the sirens went the crowds still gathered to watch, sometimes amused, always interested, never involved.

Where eight million people are gathered together over an area of some four hundred square miles everyone is a stranger. For the terrorist there is anonymity here, the opportunity to blend into whatever background he chooses. If he has funds he will take a smart flat — Mayfair or Belgravia — where a porter will salute as he goes out, but will ask no questions. Otherwise he can turn to the myriad of small hotels behind the big railway termini of North London, pay when he registers, and be left in total privacy. In the big city the man who is careful and patient, and skilled in the art of guerrilla warfare, should survive.

He can blame only himself if he fails.

The forces ranged against him are meagre. The principal and most obvious bastion that he must avoid is the civilian police force, with its headquarters at Scotland Yard, close to Victoria Station. Confronted with the increasing problems of conventional crime, serious and minor, of public apathy and lack of manpower, the metropolitan police have been forced into a crash-course in combating international violence. They started without experience and it was a hard road to make up ground when the luxury of time was not permitted. The whole concept of fighting such an enemy had been far from officials' minds when they moved their offices and files and laboratories into a towering, glass-faced structure so vulnerable to car-bomb attack that policemen had to patrol the pavement outside to prevent any vehicle parking unattended within fifty feet of its walls. But, of the hundreds of detectives who scurry in and out of the main swing doors, flashing their warrant cards at the bemedalled commissionaires, relatively few are engaged in anti-terrorist operations. Those that are belong to Special Branch, the wing formed close on a hundred years ago to counter the Irish Fenian threat.

The Irish problem still dominates their work — tying men down on the long-drawn-out surveillance of buildings, meetings, pubs, airports and homes, along with the constant search for reliable informers.

The Branch men have also to concern themselves with the potential of subversion, and keep their paperwork up to date on the fringe anarchist groups, the most militant of the background trade union officials, the activities of the Iron Curtain-bloc diplomats. They are responsible for the protection of principal Britons, from the Prime Minister downwards, and also of foreign persons of rank arriving in the country. They are not generously endowed with funds, or with manpower. Less than five hundred men, and the country to cover.

They had been informed of the planned visit of David Sokarev to Britain, but with four days to go to his arrival at Heathrow Airport they were unaware of his crucial importance to Israel, and of the extent of the threat against him. At a later stage there would be a discussion over the telephone between the Middle East desk and the Security Attache at the Israeli embassy, probably the night before the professor flew in. In the normal way of things the decision on the need for protection would be taken then, with consideration given to the availability of officers, and more pressing priorities.

But for the survival of David Sokarev on his journey through London there was another group of men far more important than the officers of the Special Branch. They worked from little-known premises in one of the most fashionable districts of the capital. Close to the Playboy Club, the London Hilton and the Londonderry Hotel, is a gaunt five-storey building. It is in need of fresh paint, pointing and general repairs. The windows, in the uniform metal-rimmed rows so beloved by architects of the twenties and thirties, are shielded by lace curtains; those on the lower floors are protected by half-inch thick concertina steel meshes. Side entrances to the block have been bricked up, as have upper windows at the corners of the building that still show the rifle-aiming slits, hurriedly fitted in 1940. There is no plaque on the walls beside the main doorway to give a clue to the occupation of those who work in the building. The parking meters set into the pavements outside the front entrance are masked by red plastic hoods to prevent the casual motorist from leaving his car there. Above the doorway, and needing the attention of the cleaners, are the words 'Leconfield House'. The building carries no other visual identification. It is the nerve-centre of the country's most secret organization, the one responsible for deep undercover counter-espionage and counter-terrorist operations; the British Security Service works from here.

Eleven hours after the tape recording of Ciaran McCoy's conversation with the Arab diplomat had been completed the spools were on the desk of a man who used a small office on the second floor of Leconfield House. A transcript had been taken by the duty clerks, who were the first to listen to the play-back, and that too lay on the high-polished oakwood surface. The room occupied by Philip Willoughby-Jones was bare to the point of starkness. A regulation square of carpet, determined by his Civil Service grade, covered the centre of the floor and was surrounded by ageing though systematically polished linoleum. The door to the room was set opposite the only window; on the third wall was a calendar sent out by a firm that specialized in the postal sales of garden bulbs; against the fourth was a steel filing cabinet. Grouped in a semi-circle in front of the desk were four chairs, framed in metal tubing, seats covered with yellow plastic, not designed for comfort but for working men who would leave them when their business was completed. The chair behind the desk offered only a slight concession in two vaguely-cushioned armrests.

Jones — he detested the hyphenated name his father had taken to using after his admittance to the masonic order of a small, East Midlands industrial town — was short and sparely built. He had a sharp gull nose that jutted out above his brush moustache, a legacy of his Royal Air Force days. His thin cheeks, merging into the shape of his bone structure, had neither colour nor verve, and were evidence of a man who had spent most of his time indoors. His hair, wispy and greying, was tended hurriedly and carelessly each morning, and remained in shape only for as long as the water used on his comb maintained order. The brightness lay in his eyes; narrow, deep-set, but alert and alive. It was his lower jaw that separated him from other men, the way the skin, lacking in wrinkles and hair, had been transposed from his right buttock to cover the incinerated layer that he had lost so many years before.

The replacement had no gloss or animation, and at the point where the new skin had been grafted to the old it irritated and annoyed. Jones was responsible for the general surveillance of the activities of Middle East embassies located in London.

Duggan, of Irish Affairs, would be down in fifteen minutes to talk with him, along with Fairclough, Arab Affairs (Palestinian). Before they came there was time to look again at the file on the embassy in Princes Gate. So much of his work was done from the files; the most thorough and successful course of action followed invariably from the writing down of minutiae — that was the Director General's belief, and the way he expected his subordinates to operate. Jones unlocked the second of the three drawers of the cabinet, and rolled it back. Hundreds of typed reports confronted him. Observations, assessments, personal biographies, transcripts of recorded telephone conversations. At the particular embassy several telephone lines were listened to, each extension warranting a separate brown folder. He flicked through them till he came to the one he wanted and lifted it out. Few sheets there. The number was only recently known, and it had been noted that little traffic came through it. Back at his desk he began to read, quickly and expertly, occasionally writing a few words in a neat trained hand on the memory-pad. There was time for a pipe before the others came, and he lit up, sucking far down into the charred wood of the bowl.

Wait till there's a big party, then move, they'd told him.

Abdel-El-Famy had delayed going through the French customs and immigration, waiting till the student group swamped the blue-uniformed officials. He had merged with them, one moment on their fringe, the next right among them. But the checks at Boulogne were casual, guided only by the report from St Omer that they should watch for someone mud-spattered and probably unshaven.

Famy's delaying tactics were unnecessary. His real protection came in the orange shirt he now wore, which had been neatly ironed and that had not suffered from its time in the grip-case; and in his laundered jeans and hip-length navy corduroy jacket. He had shaved, too, so that he fitted none of the descriptions that had been issued to the harbour police. The pistol and the soiled clothes were buried beneath the previous autumn's windfall of leaves in a wood to the east of the town. They would be found, eventually — but long after he had completed the task that had been set for him.

On the crossing Famy had made a conscious attempt to talk to a section of the party. His knowledge of French was variable, but sufficient to allow him to strike up conversation It was the start of a holiday and so spirits were high; there was no shortage of young people to laugh and joke with. The lecturer looking after the students for their eight days in London was vaguely aware that a tall, swarthy man, a little older than the others, and now among them, had not been at the station in Paris. It puzzled him, but he knew only a few of the group, and had had little time on the Paris-to-Boulogne leg of the journey to get close to them. He shrugged it off; perhaps a friend from home, or from school…

Famy saw the white ribbon of cliff as the boat swung to port, beginning its run to the long jetty. Not the clear white he had expected, not the formidable barrier he had read of in the university at Beirut, but shallow and with fields coming down toward the sea. The castle caught his eye, powerful, squat and old-fashioned. He smiled to himself, savouring it; that was his enemy, tired now, outdated, unable to compete in the new and modern world that he was seeking, unable to comprehend the hitting power of the Palestinian movement, unable to defend itself against the new philosophy of revolution and attack.

The two girls from Orleans and the boy from St Etienne were a long time getting their baggage together after the complicated process of docking and tying up. Famy was patient, the rest of the group less so. From the lecturer and other students came cries for the three to hurry themselves.

It suited Famy well. Out of the delay would come anxiety about the train connections for London, and that would mean a concentrated, excited rush at the customs and immigration barriers.

And that was how it was. As Customs quizzed the first four of the party the lecturer began to shout and wave the folder with the rail tickets. Other students joined in, all hugely enjoying the performance. The officials were good-humoured enough, and the party went through. Famy handed over the white immigration card, duly filled in, at the desk, and was talking deeply with the two girls as they swept past the Port Watch Special Branch men. He didn't rate a glance from them. His passport was still in his inner pocket, unrequired, unexamined.

For Famy there was now a moment of indecision. His orders, the orders for the three of them when they left Beirut, had been specific about the next stage of the journey. The instruction was that under no circumstances were they to travel via the direct Dover-to-London rail connection. If for any reason you are suspected, they had said, the authorities have two-and-a-half-hours' grace to make up their minds and intercept at the terminal at Victoria. His people had been adamant about this, and thorough enough to provide the bus time-table that would enable the squad to move down the coast and then link up with a train not connected with the cross-channel services.

Famy reasoned that although he was travelling a full day behind schedule the time-tables would remain constant. He had felt safe with the group and was reluctant to leave them, but his orders made no allowance for personal initiative at this stage. When the girls looked round for him he had disappeared.

There were endless waits at bus stops, interspersing the tedious stages of the journey. Dover to Folkestone, seven miles. Folkestone to Ashford, seventeen miles. Ashford to Maidstone, eighteen miles. And in all that time nobody, with the exception of the ticket men, spoke a word to him

— not a greeting, not a smile, not a syllable of conversation.

In Maidstone, a dull, boring little town, it looked to him, as he walked through the streets busy with Friday afternoon shoppers, he reverted to the railway system, and a slow stopping train to London. As he climbed into the carriage he reflected with satisfaction that he was within an hour of his destination, and the streets on which it had been determined that David Sokarev would die.

It was a difficult meeting in Leconfield House — three men round the one desk, close to their copies of the transcript, attempting to read more into the badly-typed words than they could find. There were many silences, and an adjournment was forced on them by the necessity for Duggan and Fairclough to return to their offices to search for anything that might throw light on the single brief conversation they had been given. After an hour of sparring round the problem Jones had felt it was time for summary and analysis.

'Let's just stop a minute,' he said, wanting to be back with specifics. 'Let's establish what we have from our own material before we start going elsewhere and picking other people's stuff. First, the number our friend McCoy telephoned is rarely used, but was considered of some importance or that little sod who gave it us wouldn't have looked as though he thought he was doing us the favour. When we spoke to him last he seemed to think we were getting the bargain out of it. So, it's sensitive. That's borne out by our second point of reference, the call itself. It's different to other calls on the line, on the number. They've been in some code, but we haven't enough on that yet, and it's not broken.'

He reached among his own papers, taking from one of the files four foolscap sheets, each printed over only three lines.

'Stuff like this. Doesn't make much sense, but this is what we have. "Accommodation one-seven-three, six-five, one-six-two." That was put over three days ago, bit of preamble, not much. English accent, probably disguised.

Next night something similar, same sort of style. "Rendez-vous as arranged, seven-seven, one, six." Both times it's the incoming calls that are given the information. On to the message last night. To my mind it represents a failure of rendezvous — clear to the deaf that, nothing remarkable in that piece of deduction. But where the pattern breaks down is that though the voice is the same as the first two calls this time he uses a name. Introduces himself. Doesn't use a code-word, bursts straight in.'

Fairclough spoke. 'Try the simplest way through.

McCoy, the name we have and which is perhaps genuine, he's hanging about last night. Cools his heels waiting for someone. Gets fed up. Wants to know what's happening and calls the number, the contact number he's been given.

Uses the call box. But he's got to be angry, hopping bloody mad. Too angry to remember the drill he's been given.

What's the code-word used in the first two calls?' That he couldn't remember it annoyed Fairclough; a concise, organized man, he liked to have things at his fingers.

'Just one word, it seems,' said Jones. 'Just the word

"Mushroom", then straight into the message, and whatever that means. No delay; very professional. No possibility of a trace on a call of the length they've been using.'

'Bloody impossible,' interjected Duggan, who didn't like the way events were shaping — the pattern that was building. Too ominous, too much that smacked of planning, and who was it that plans even on such unimportant details?

'Back to the scene, back to the facts.' Jones knew the way a meeting could disintegrate into side-tracking, into theory, and end up with a morning gone.

'We establish that for last night's call there is no use of the code. We also establish that our little diplomat feels it worth sitting in his miserable hutch half the evening waiting for the incomings, long after the crowd he works with are off swigging sherbet and tomato juice on the merry-go-round. When we look at him, what we have on him, there's damn all. New here, within the last few months. Ostensibly small job — visas and passports. Oil men and few businessmen, not that many, but he has a phone line of his own and an extension not listed in their directory. Takes calls at any time, either arranged or he sleeps in there.'

He paused. He was talking too much, doing his school-master bit again. Shouldn't be like that with his colleagues, but he'd caught the Duggan chill, and didn't want it to spread. Even among friends doubt and apprehension are corrosive. Bloody daft though, wasn't it? Three grown men, playing schoolboy riddles, working on a braintease.

Fun this one, because they've torn up the answers, won't tell you whether you're right or not. Can change the questions half-way through, can't they, just when you're warming? Their initiative, always the same, always the bastards have the initiative. And the three of them were there, pushing the hot air up, seeking another justification for another lost weekend. Ought to have one's head examined, working oneself into a lather, eighty-hour week, another fraught telephone call home. Bloody stupid.

Plough on, Jonesey, they're all waiting.

'So we come finally to the complication. Mystery Irish voice, the magic accent that gives us all wet dreams at night.' Duggan looked pained; Fairclough smiled.

Jones went on, 'What is McCoy doing — waiting for his mate and, when the blind date doesn't show, phoning a confidential embassy number? Thoughts, gentlemen?'

He'd finished. Let the others pick the bones out of that lot. Nasty smell it left, not too tangible yet, but enough of a stench to alert him.

Duggan's turn. He'd contributed little so far. The area he covered in his work was very different to that of the other two men. They were long-range, working on hypotheses, dealing with the possible, but the unlikely. His concern was the probable, and exact and known threat, that went under the initials of 'PIRA' — Provisional Irish Republican Army. When he had slipped back to his office earlier he had checked against his own list of suspects, and the cross-references, looking for any mentions of Ciaran McCoy. None existed. He had telephoned the headquarters of Military Intelligence at Lisburn, County Down, in Northern Ireland. They would begin their searches, feed his request into the computer. 'Negative' or 'Positive' would be on the telex by lunch-time at the earliest, mid-afternoon by the latest. if the boy's PIRA it's difficult to explain. They've had contacts with this Government. Bought arms there. The Claudia and the Klashnikovs that we intercepted, they were from this source. They've had meetings there, discussions, but their politics are the width of the Sahara apart.

If there is a liaison then it would be of direct necessity. It's to do one thing, then forget it. They couldn't hold together for anything sustained. But we have to know about this boy, we have to localize him.'

'It's the place we have to start,' Fairclough chipped in.

'Only bloody place we can begin, it's from McCoy we start pulling the pieces together. But if they're talking about a link-up then we're not far off the spectacular.

After rendezvous they don't hang about knitting, they move on to target. That's the Arab way — what we have to be thinking about if we believe the liaison exists. They come in late and they hit and they shift. Munich's the best example. The crowd that went into the Olympic village arrived two and three days before the attack. But they'll have done the planning, and with thoroughness. Go back to Munich again: they were setting that up seven months earlier.'

'Don't know why we bother,' Duggan, determined to depress.

'Perhaps they're not available to come at all,' Jones murmured, a smile playing round his lips, contorted a little on the graft line, and accentuating the divisions in the age of the skin. 'You saw the morning papers. Shoot-out near Boulogne. Two men believed Arabs cut up at a road block.

But nothing from the "Firm" yet.'

'Nice thought,' agreed Fairclough.

There was a gentle knock on the door. The girl who came in was tall, a little plump, fair hair back over her shoulders. Her skirt was an inch too long, her sweater an inch too tight. Too many bulges. She was Helen Anderson, and had been personal secretary to Jones for the last eight years.

'Sorry to interrupt, sir,' she said quietly.

No, you bloody aren't, thought Duggan. You run this bloody office, come and go when you please. Sorry, my arse.

She repeated, 'Sorry, sir, I didn't put it through, but there's been a message for Mr Fairclough, from Foreign Office. The Israelis have made a contact with our people in Cyprus. The report will be coming over the wire later on. When they've put it through the mincer, found the right code-book, it'll be sent over. They said it was important, that you should wait on for it.'

She nodded her head, accepted that the message had been understood, and was gone.

'That's the bloody evening gone, for the lot of us,' said Fairclough. 'You'll be waiting all ears and pencils for this phone chat-up, Duggan for trace, me flogging through this lot.'

They all laughed. They bitched and moaned every Friday night when work saturated their desks, and they always stayed.

Only a very few of the businessmen who dropped in for a quick one with their wives or secretaries or mistresses to the White Elephant or the Curzon House Club on the other side of the street would have had any inkling of the work of the men whose light burned late into the night in the gaunt building opposite.

The Israeli who had flown to the Akrotiri Royal Air Force base in south-west Cyprus was travelling under the direct instructions of the Director of Military Intelligence in Tel Aviv. He came anonymously, the only passenger in an ageing nine-seater Aero Commander. Much of the exchange of information between the various wings of Israel's security services and the British Secret Intelligence Service — SIS or 'the Firm', as the trade called it — was conducted in the immense, sprawling RAF camp. To meet him was one of the resident British team who had driven the seventy-five miles from Nicosia in response to a telephone message from the Israeli embassy there to the British High Commission. The British took note of the warnings that were flashed to London from the island; on at least a half of the occasions that troops had been drafted into Heathrow Airport it followed close on information received via the harsh sun-reflecting tarmac at Akrotiri.

That evening the two men wasted little time, and the Israeli was in the air again less than twenty-five minutes after their conversation had begun. It was sufficient for him to make five points. First, a Palestinian assassination squad had been intercepted on its way through northern France. Second, the Israeli security representative in Paris was both unhappy with the French authorities' follow-up of the incident and uncertain that all the members of the gang had been accounted for. Third, the Israelis had gained the knowledge that the operation was code-named 'Mushroom'. Fourth, his country's premier but largely unknown nuclear scientist would be leaving Tel Aviv for Britain on the following Monday to fulfil a long-standing speaking engagement. And fifth, his Government would react extremely unfavourably if any incident should mar the visit. Understatement was the man's style, but he repeated the last three times.

'He is important to us — very important in certain fields that we consider vital to our national defence. You understand what I have said?'

The Englishman looked across at the ground crew standing beside the plane — out of earshot, but curious about the two men.

He asked, 'If he's so important and the threat exists, why not call the visit off, and forget about it?'

' If we did that every time there was a threat we would become immured, sterilized. We don't bend the knee to these bastards, and we expect the support of your agencies in the United Kingdom.'

'Anything else that could help us?' said the Englishman.

He thought, the little sod, he's enjoying it. Always do when they can wrap someone else up in their interminable problems.

'Nothing more. Just keep it tight round him, our Professor. As you would say, tight as a guinea-pig's arse.'

Always the same, thought the Englishman. They revel in it — the rest of the world jumping to their bloody orders.

He too would have a destroyed evening, writing and then encoding his report, but unlike the men in London he would be scratching out of a cocktail party. The big girl from Chancery would have… made you bloody sick.

The information Duggan had requested was brought from the basement bank of teletype machines at four o'clock.

He read the paper with care, the frown deepening on his forehead as he waded through the lines of blue-punched capitals.

Timing: 15.52. hours. Friday 28/6.

Subject: McCoy, Ciaran Patrick Aloysius.

Address: Ballynafeigh fm, nr Crossmaglen, SArmagh, NI.

Age/DOB: 22 years, 14.3.54.

Security File: For last three years McCoy has been member Crossmaglen Bn PIRA… After one year was reported I/C Active Service Unit operating Cullyhanna area. Believed expert rifle shot, natural leader. Arrested Sec Forces 8/12/74. ICO and detention order. Held HM Prison Maze where became PIRA cage commandant. Freed on Sec of State's instruction 3/7/75. Since then active in political work and would return again to violence should situation deteriorate. Last is Mil Intelligence and SB assessment. Believed responsible for shootings incidents in SArmagh area, specifically RUC patrol car 17/8/74 and sniping of paratroop killed 10/10/74. Pix and Prints following.

Background: Undermentioned is person-to-person confidential from Mil Intelligence HQ 3BDE, Lurgan, NI and not for release outside your department.

We astonished at release of McCoy and protests were via Commander Land Forces to appropriate political offices. Reply was that as McCoy only detainee from that area and response to local PIRA required in existing cease-fire situation he was being freed. Exclaimer. Regarded as of high calibre and exception to colleagues in that has good educational standards with full secondary education from Armagh City. Deceptive in manner and could pass well in all company.

Re your specific requests:

1. Last seen in area approx 10/12. days ago.

2. No known visits to London, but sister once worked St Mary's Hosp, Paddington London