Leon Uris (31 page)

“Tell me something I don’t know!” I demanded.

“The Irish Republican Brotherhood,” he said softly, “is fostering a delusion of a united Ireland.”

Conor was speaking blasphemy! He was attacking the very cornerstone of republicanism. I tried to wave him off, to hear no more.…

“What the hell does Ireland want with a million lunatics sworn to destroy us? They are the tragic orphans of this Irish calamity, His Majesty’s Royal Ulster lepers,” he continued, grabbing me by the arms and shaking me. “By God, Seamus O’Neill, we Irish are a civilized people. We cannot allow them to poison our wells with their hatred. I say, wall them off and let them bang their bloody Lembeg drums and sing their bloody Reformation hymns and fly their bloody Union Jacks…but keep them out of our lives or we will end up diseased like they are. I say, give them their filthy province, for if we don’t we will have condemned the Irish people to eternal damnation.”

“God!” I screamed, “Who else have you told this to!”

“Ah, Seamus lad, I’ve not seen you so pale. What’s the matter? Truth is truth.”

“And treason is treason!”

“So be it. The truth is that there is as much chance of bringing reason, much less love, to these people up north as there is of trying to draw gold out of the winds. The
truth is that I would have to destroy my own truths, and myself, in order to become a Long Dan Sweeney.”

We were as quiet as the tombstones in Sam Grady’s yard. Ah shyte, it was vintage Conor Larkin I heard. Who in the Irish Republican Brotherhood had not lied to himself about the same question? We would go on for generation after generation without the courage to face the truth that Irish unity was a myth.

Who but Conor Larkin would have the courage to stand up and speak truth in the face of a hurricane of hypocrisy? Conor alone refused to play the game. That is why he had remained a loner.

I was totally captured by what the man had concluded in finding a path through the swamp. I’ve been his follower since I messed my first diaper. Would he confide in me now?

“Seeing as how you’re unloading your mind,” I said gingerly, “would you mind telling me how you see our recent future?”

He stared at me rather strangely. “Don’t even question that I trust you entirely,” he said, “but do you want to be burdened with some highly inflammable secrets, even if you don’t agree with me?”

“That’s up to you, Conor. You’re the one with the burden. Maybe you need to hear yourself say out loud what you’ve been thinking.”

“Maybe I do, runt. I’ll give you the simple version,” he said slowly. “We have brought the Brotherhood to a capability to execute well-planned raids.”

“Bridges, police stations?” I asked.

“Bigger. Our first priority is to make a monumental strike, keenly planned, using a maximum of men—say two dozen volunteers on a target that will stop the momentum of the Ulster Volunteers, hit the British in the stomach like a mule’s kick, and be of such magnitude they will never fully recover from it.”

“Surely we’ve never had a success like that against the
British in five hundred years. All we seem to end up with are glorious defeats.”

“Victory,” he said, and it was a lovely-sounding word. “A giant raid is the priority.”

“Why, what’s your thinking?”

“To make the Brotherhood believe in itself as fighters. To have gained the knowledge that the British are not invincible. To know two dozen Irishmen can inflict a grievous defeat on them. But mainly, the Irish people will realize they are being led by men of skill and valor and not a bunch of blowhard barroom republicans.”

“That all sounds lovely,” I said, playing the devil’s advocate, “but where are you going to find twenty-five Irishmen who won’t fuck up the detail?”

“We already have them, Seamus. It’s merely a matter of making them believe they can do it.”

“How?”

“We pick our finest and urge them gently to volunteer. Then we sequester them and inflict brutal training, infinite execution, willingness to sacrifice. We make them believe in each other. We make them believe in their leaders. We tease them about a target that will change the name of Irish history. You see, that’s why I can’t have the Council muck it up. The Council is well meaning and they’re talented, but we’ve no discipline and less faith in ourselves.”

“How are you going to keep this secret from them?”

“Dan Sweeney will approve the raid and the Council will accept his argument for absolute secrecy. If they don’t trust Dan Sweeney, then we have no Brotherhood.”

“And just when does this extraordinary event take place?”

“We go into training the minute the war starts on the European continent.”

Jesus, Conor Larkin was dead serious. When the man thinks things out, he does it, indeed, indeed. I felt myself quivering and almost too dry to speak. “So, you remove a major target, then what? Do the British leave Ireland?”

“Are you going to continue to be hilarious or are you after listening?”

“I’m listening,” I croaked.

“After the big raid we bend all our efforts to completing our infiltration of a home army and make it our nationwide tactical unit. This will give us three to four thousand men, maybe more, legally under arms.”

“You’re dreaming. The British will never allow us to have a home guard.”

“At some time they’re going to have to. The Ulster Militia is going to become so powerful they’ll have to throw us a bone, and in a war they’ll have to let us watch the coast and guard certain facilities.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“I say there will be an Irish Home Army. A year or so into the war, at a time of the Brotherhood’s choosing, we use the Home Army to stage a nationwide rising and declare Irish independence.”

“Declare what?”

“Independence, man, independence!”

“So then the British leave Ireland?”

“The Brits will put the rising down ruthlessly. How dare the paddies jump us in the back when we’re in the trenches in Europe! The very savagery of their reaction will further arouse the Irish people. I say, fuck them, Seamus, fuck them. Our freedom is not on
their
timetable, but
ours
. When they have squashed the rising, the Declaration of Independence will still stand.”

A drink, that’s the ticket. I started to get into the flow of what I was hearing. You see, that’s what you have to like about Conor. He was speaking in terms of what could be done in reality.

“Now then,” Conor continued, “they’ve put the rising down, but a lot of Irish people are pissed about it who didn’t give a damn before the rising, and a lot of Irish soldiers in British uniform will start to thinking about a free Ireland. Then, we spring the trap.”

“What trap? They’ve put us down,” I said.

“The Sinn Fein trap,” Conor said. “We get elections. The Irish Party gets its burial from the Irish people and Sinn Fein represents us…and…”

“And,” I whispered, “Arthur Griffith forms a provisional government.”

Conor smiled and winked at me.

I think I repeated the name of our Savior twenty times, and his fine mother another twenty. He had smelled the rhythm of history itself. He knew that Irish people could be outraged in this manner. But his plan was filled with blood…our blood. I feared the asking, but I managed. “What will the British do even if we have declared independence and have a provisional government? You know we can never beat them on the battlefield.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Conor said.

“So you have.”

“Aye. How does a small native force deal with a large foreign army throughout history? First, we win the people over so that every house in the land is a hideaway and every pair of eyes is spying for us. In the countryside we ambush their convoys and disappear into the landscape. We splatter out rail bridges and power stations. We assassinate their constabulary in the villages and towns. This will force them into their barracks and we will own the countryside. Lock their soldiers in so they are no longer free to dance with our lassies at the Saturday ceilidhi. Keep them looking over their shoulders.”

“Can that happen?”

“Once the ship of freedom sets sail, it cannot be deterred. Too many new leaders will emerge from the ranks, too many people willing to follow them. And in the cities we will destroy their infrastructure by hit-and-run raids on their vital installations and force them to tie up thousands of troops to guard them.”

“Conor, the British are not going to stand by and let this happen.”

“Yes,” he agreed excitedly, “they will be faced with two distinct choices. They will come to the conference table…”

“Or?”

“Or start to burn Ireland to the ground, and the more they burn, the angrier the Irish people will become.”

“But who will come to save us, Conor?”

“No one, Seamus, it’s Sinn Fein, Ourselves Alone.”

“You and I have always feared the resolve of the Irish people.”

“Aye,” he said, “and it’s going to be sorely tested. But when in all of man’s history has freedom been handed to a people as a present? The Irish will deserve their freedom if they are willing to bleed and sacrifice for it. We have to crave our freedom more than the other fellow wants to keep us in his fist.”

Stop! Stop, Conor, stop! My head is dinnlin’. Was this the ultimate fantasy, the grandiose theory of a man who had spent too much time pondering alone, or had he captured the crest of a movement on Gaelic wings that had been swelling to this crescendo since before the turn of the century?

He made remarkable sense. Something had to give in Ireland. The republican Sinn Fein had already rushed in to fill the political vacuum being left by the failing Irish Party. The Brotherhood did have an operational capacity.

Conor spoke common sense. He spoke of attainable goals. I realized that he had already picked out the target for the first big strike, and I knew what it was.

“Now, just what is it that we’re going to take out in this big old raid we’re going to make?”

“
We
aren’t going to raid anything.
You
are not invited. That is a definite absolute.”

“Don’t make me sneak in through the back door,” I said.

“You’re too small.”

“Bullshit. The greatest raid in Irish history and you are going to close me out after all the miles of muddy road we’ve walked together?”

“I’m thinking we’ll need a highly placed writer of your caliber to immortalize things.”

“Bullshit, Ireland has too many bad writers and twice as many orators to fail to immortalize you. You think it’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t know how dangerous it is, see,” Conor lied. I always knew when he was lying to me. If he was sitting, he always scratched his knee, three times, quickly. If he was up and walking he’d quicklike bite his lower lip. He scratched his knee, stood, and bit his lip. “There are more than a dozen targets under consideration,” he continued.

“Bullshit,” I explained.

“Don’t even think about the half of it, Seamus. The target is only going to be known by myself and Dan, so dismiss any wild guesses.”

“I’ll not make a wild guess. I’ll tell you the target, directly and precisely.”

Conor narrowed his eyes and glared at me.

“Now then,” I began, “It’s going to be a target in Ulster. So, we’re talking about the naval base in Belfast or the British Army Command at Castle MacStewart or cut the cable to England and so forth and so forth. However, if I were a lad who grew up in Ballyutogue and summered the flock for two years at the derelict castle grounds of Lettershambo, and as kids me and my best pal had found a cave at low tide on the lough leading to a tunnel into the castle…”

Conor’s eyes breathed lightning.

“And later I worked on the restoration of Lettershambo, and the Ulster Militia stored maybe a hundred thousand guns in it along with a million rounds of ammunition, then I might be considering such a target…if the tunnel is still intact.”

“It’s still intact,” Conor whispered.

“Myles McCracken’s brother Boyd is the best poacher on Lough Foyle. He stole enough fish from his lordship to feed the entire village when the crops went sour. And
Boyd is a Brotherhood man who can get us over Lough Foyle.”

“We carry a few hundred pounds of dynamite into the castle.”

“Charlie Hackett,” I said, naming the best dynamite man in Ireland.

“Charlie Hackett,” Conor repeated.

“Well, what the hell are we going to do with a few hundred pounds of dynamite?” I asked. “Put our initials in the castle wall?”

“During the restoration, I helped install the central heating boiler. It is only twenty or thirty feet from where the tunnel enters the castle.”

“I know…”

“From the boiler there are large pipes, a foot in diameter, going to every room and hall in the castle. Hot-air ducts, they’re called. One of the rooms holds their dynamite stash, probably several hundred tons of it. If we can blow up the boiler it will shoot a fierce concussion through the ducts.”

“And blow their dynamite stash,” I whispered.

“Aye, take down Lettershambo with their own dynamite.”

“W-w-will it work?”

“We’ll know for sure when we push in the plunger.”

For a moment I swooned, then looked at him, crazy-like. Why, that would be like blowing up Gibraltar! I looked at him again. He was dead serious. Obviously, he had worked it out in his mind down to the most finite detail. I just must have fallen into a chair and mumbled.

In time, night took over Cork. After the magnitude of what was contemplated sunk in, we both thought of what Ireland would be like the day after Lettershambo was blown up. Suddenly the worth of my entire life was clear. Conor and I, two bumpkins out of Ballyutogue, had reached a moment of euphoria together, in fulfillment over what we had lived to try to accomplish.

Conor Larkin’s face showed the wearies. What a fitting
way to bow out, I thought. Bow out? Bow out! Of course. As I rethought it, I sensed his awesome journey of a great deal of joy, of tragedy, and of melancholy reaching a climax in a burst that would shake the British Isles. Larkin intended to put every drop of his energy and wisdom into the raid and then depart the scene.