Malloy grimaced and wished for his darts. He didn’t need to see the intelligence information. The faces of known or suspected terrorists were of no use to him. He never got close enough to see them. That was the job of the shooters, and division commander or not he was merely their chauffeur. Well, it could have been worse. At least he was able to wear his “bag,” or flight suit, at his desk, almost as though this were a proper organization of’ aviators. He got to fly four days or so out of seven, and that wasn’t bad, and after this assignment, his detailer had hinted, he might go on to command of VMH-1, and maybe fly the president around. It would be dull, but career enhancing. It surely hadn’t hurt his old friend, Colonel Hank Goodman, who had just appeared on the star list, a fairly rare achievement for a rotor-head, since naval aviation, which was mainly helicopter drivers, was run, and run ruthlessly, by fast movers in their jet powered fixed-wing fighter bombers. Well, they all had prettier scarves. To amuse himself before lunch, Malloy pulled out his manual for the MH-60K and started to memorize additional information on engine performance, the kind of thing usually done by an engineering officer or maybe his crew chief, Sergeant Jack Nance.
The initial meeting took place in a public park. Popov had checked the telephone book and called the number for one Patrick X. Murphy just before noon.
“Hello, this is Joseph Andrews. I’m trying to find Mr. Yates,” he’d said.
That statement was followed by silence, as the man on the other end of the phone had searched his memory for the code phrase. It was an old one, but after ten seconds or so, he’d fished it out.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Andrews. We haven’t heard from you in some time.”
“I just arrived in Dublin this morning, and I’m looking forward to seeing him. How quickly. can we get together?”
“How about one this afternoon?” And then had come the instructions.
So, here he was now, wearing his raincoat and wide brimmed fedora hat, carrying a copy of the Irish Times in his right hand, and sitting on a particular bench close to an oak tree. He used the downtime to read the paper and catch up on what was happening in the world-it wasn’t very different from what he’d seen on CNN the previous day in New York… international news had gotten so dull since the demise of the Soviet Union, and he wondered how the editors of major newspapers had learned to deal with it. Well, people in Rwanda and Burundi were still slaughtering one another with obscene gusto, and the Irish were wondering aloud if soldiers from their army might be sent down as peacekeepers. Wasn’t that odd? Popov thought. They’d proven singularly unable to keep the peace at home, so why, then, send them elsewhere to do it?
“Joe!” a happy voice said out of his field of vision. He looked up to see a fortyish man with a beaming smile.
“Patrick!” Popov responded, standing, going over to shake hands. “It’s been a long time.” Very long, as he’d never met this particular chap before, though they exchanged greetings like old friends. With that, they walked off to O’Connell Street, where a car was waiting. Popov and his new friend got in the back, and the driver took off at once, not speeding, but checking his rearview mirror carefully as he took several random turns. “Patrick” in the back looked up for helicopters. Well, Dmitriy thought, these PIRA soldiers hadn’t lived to their current ages by being careless. For his part, Popov just sat back and relaxed. He might have closed his eyes, but that would have been overly patronizing to his hosts. Instead, he just stared forward. It was not his first time in Dublin, but except for a few obvious landmarks, he remembered little of the city. His current companions would not have believed that, since intelligence officers were supposed to have trained, photographic memories-which was true, but only to a point. It took forty minutes of weaving through the city until they came to a commercial building and looped around into an alley. There the car stopped, and they got out to enter a door in a blank brick wall.
“Iosef Andreyevich,” a voice said calmly in the darkness. Then a face appeared.
“Sean, it has been a long time.” Popov stepped forward, extending his hand.
“Eleven years and six months, to be exact,” Sean Grady agreed, taking the hand and shaking it warmly.
“Your trade-craft remains excellent.” Popov smiled. “I have no idea where we are.”
“Well, one must be careful, Iosef.” Grady waved. “Come this way, if you would.”
Grady directed him to a small room with a table and a few chairs. There was tea brewing. The Irish hadn’t lost their sense of hospitality, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw, removing his coat and dumping it on an armchair. Then he sat down.
“What can we do for you?” Grady asked. He was nearing fifty, Popov saw, but the eyes retained their youth and their dedicated look, narrow, overtly without passion, but intense as ever.
“Before we get to that, how are things going for you, Sean?”
“They could be better,” Grady admitted. “Some of our former colleagues in Ulster have committed themselves to surrendering to the British Crown. Unfortunately, there are many who share those leanings, but we are working to persuade others to a more realistic point of view.”
“Thank you,” Popov said to the one who gave him a cup of tea. He took a sip before speaking. “Sean, you know, from the first time we met in Lebanon, I have respected your commitment to your ideals. I am surprised that so many others have wavered.”
“It’s been a long war, Iosef, and I suppose that not everyone can maintain his dedication. And more is the pity, my friend.” Again his voice was singularly devoid of emotion. His face wasn’t so much cruel as blank. He would have made a superb field intelligence officer. the Russian thought. He gave away nothing, not even the satisfaction he occasionally felt when he accomplished a mission. He’d probably showed as little passion when he’d tortured and murdered two British SAS commandos who’d made the mistake of letting down their guard just once. Such things had not happened often, but Sean Grady had achieved that most difficult of goals twice-at the cost, truth be told, of a bloody vendetta between the British Army’s most elite unit and Grady’s own cell of the PIRA. The SAS had killed no fewer than eight of his closest associates, and on one other occasion some seven years before they’d missed Grady only because his car had broken down on the way to a meeting-a meeting crashed by the SAS, who had killed three senior PIRA officials there. Sean Grady was a marked man, and Popov was certain that the British Security Service had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in their attempt to track him down and target him for another commando raid. This, like intelligence operations, was a very dangerous game for all the players, but most of all for the revolutionaries themselves. And now his own leadership wasselling out, or so Grady must have thought. This man would never make peace with the British. He believed too firmly in his vision of the world, warped though it was. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin had possessed a face like this one, and the same single-mindedness of purpose, and the same total inability to compromise on strategic issues.
“There is a new counter-terror team operating in England now,” Dmitriy told him.
“Oh?” Grady hadn’t known that, and the revelation surprised him.
“Yes. It is called Rainbow. It is a joint effort of the British and Americans, and it was they who handled the jobs at Worldpark, Vienna, and Bern. They have not yet been committed to this particular mission, but that is only, I think, a matter of time.”
“What do you know about this new group?”
“Quite a lot.” Popov handed over his written summary.
“Hereford,” Grady observed. “We’ve been there to look, but it is not a place one can easily attack.”
“Yes, I know that, Sean, but there are additional vulnerabilities, and with proper planning, we think it possible to strike a hard blow on this Rainbow group. You see, both the wife and daughter of the group commander, this American, John Clark, work at the nearby community hospital. They would be the bait for the mission=”
“Bait?” Grady asked.
“Yes, Sean.” And then Popov went on to describe the mission concept. Grady, as ever, didn’t react, but two of his people did, shifting in their chairs and trading looks while waiting for their commander to speak. This he finally did, rather formally.
“Colonel Serov, you propose that we undertake a major risk.”
Dmitriy nodded. “Yes, that is true, and it is for you to decide if the risk is worth the rewards.” Popov didn’t have to remind the IRA chieftain that he’d helped them in the past-in a minor way to be sure, but these were not people to forget assistance-but neither did he have to point out that this mission, if successful, would not only catapult Grady to the forefront t of IRA commanders, but also, perhaps, poison the peace process between the British government and the “official” faction of the PIRA. To be the man who humbled the SAS and other special-operations teams on their own turf would win him such prestige as no Irish revolutionary had enjoyed since 1920. That was always the weakness of such people, Popov knew. Their dedication to ideology made them hostage to their egos, to their vision, not only of their political objectives, but of themselves.