Night Crossing

Chapter One August 1, 1998 . . . In the quiet harbor of Inishowen, which faced east to the Irish Sea, Captain James Oliver Blackburn stood on the bow of a sailing sloop waiting for the men from Group Four to arrive. After more than a year of American-brokered negotiations between the warring fac- tions in Northern Ireland, the chance for peace was in grave jeopardy. A drastic measure to save the Good Friday peace accords was to be set into motion this morning in a secret meeting of senior intelligence officers in the North Channel of the Irish Sea. Blackburn, an Englishman from Lancashire, was a tall, gangly man, forty-eight years old, narrow-waisted, with the thin, slightly bowed legs of a schoolboy. He had sideburns that would have been fashionable in another era, high cheekbones, and piercing blue eyes that were narrowed against the cold morning rain. It was the first of August, but in this remote part of Northern Ireland, summer had already begun to fade. Blackburn shivered, but not from the cold. What was going to take place in the next several hours would set in motion an atrocity that the civilized world, and God, and he himself would forever condemn. There would be no forgiveness. But he was a part of it now; there was no turning back. And what was worse'maybe this was what made him shiver'he was eager for it to happen. The alarm on his watch went off, he checked the time'seven'and just as the watch stopped beeping he looked out to the mouth of the harbor. In seconds he heard a motor off to the west. And then a corresponding sound to the south. He waited as the boats appeared. He checked his watch again: 7:03. If nothing else, we are precise, he thought. The boats were purposely unmatched, one a Grumman 34 trawler like those used by cod fishermen out of Portsmouth, the other a Keisling Fury, twenty-five feet along the waterline from bow to stern, with a two-ton keel. He knew that there were two snipers on board each boat, fore and aft, armed with Italian-made Carlino long-range rifles, silencers screwed into the barrels, their scopes fitted with infrared filters for night vision. The skippers of both boats, men who would not be identifiable by either the British government or the IRA if they were caught, had been smuggled into the country three days earlier. They had traveled from Rome under false French passports, and Blackburn himself had sailed them here from Stranraer, Scotland. During the meeting this morning they would be in constant voice communication, via satellite, with Carl Landry in an unmarked office at the rear of a record shop on Bathe Street in Belfast. Landry was a good man, brought up through the ranks of counterespionage by the Thatcher administration. His obsessive personality made him perfect for this operation. He couldn't leave his office at the end of a day without straightening the Oriental rug in front of the tall windows that looked down on Bridge Street and lining up the pencils on his desk in ascending lengths. Sixteen years ago, Landry had been stationed at Dublin Castle, and on occasion Blackburn had been his doubles partner in agency badminton tournaments. Those were the dark days of the Irish Troubles, when it seemed a passageway to peace would never be found. Peace, Blackburn thought. He had imagined it luxuriously and hungered for it the way a man hungers for a woman's touch. And in the last year it was finally there, in the wind and in whispers. To Blackburn it felt like a vindication of everything he had believed in from the time when he had volunteered before his twentieth birthday for transfer from his first post in the ranks of the Royal Guard on Downing Street to the Special Services in Northern Ireland. How odd, he thought, how terribly odd, that now, in order to have the peace at last, he would betray the British government he honored and the army he had pledged himself to. Watching the observation boats take their fiSnyder, Don J. is the author of 'Night Crossing' with ISBN 9780375409066 and ISBN 0375409068.