Power Play (41 page)

The admiral gazed quietly along the playing field.

“You can’t see it,” said Liam Mulligan, “but every Irishman knows it’s there. And what it means. And for sympathizers with the Sinn Fein party, that hill represents the two words we all carry in our hearts: Ourselves Alone.”

The admiral turned to say good-bye, and he held out his hand in friendship. He said something that the Irishman did not fully understand, but nonetheless caught the drift. “We mentioned that to the Brits nearly 250 years ago,” said Arnold. “So long, Liam . . . See you on Hill 16.”

The helicopter took off immediately for the 165-mile journey home to the West Cork coast. They made it in just less than an hour, only to find the Lancasters and Kathy had gone to Kinsale for lunch and would not be back until late afternoon.

Arnold was happy to have the place to himself and settled down in his wicker rocking chair on the outside terrace with a book on the Easter Rising. But the traveling had loosened his concentration, and, on reflection, he preferred just to sit and gaze out to the long ocean swells of the Celtic Sea, alert, as ever, for the sighting of a periscope of an Oscar Class Russian submarine. He reached out for his old US Navy binoculars and focused on a distant Irish trawler that was driving home before a hard sou’wester, toward the Old Head of Kinsale.

Just then the phone rang on the white table beside him—Jack Kirkpatrick from Dublin. The news was excellent. Arnold and the
taoiseach
would meet at an informal dinner to be held in the ambassador’s residence
in Phoenix Park on Friday evening, 7:30 p.m., dinner at 8:00. “My wife will be there,” he said. “And I invited Lizzie McGrath, so I think Mrs. Morgan should come with you.”

“Couldn’t be better, Jack,” replied Arnold. “No problems landing at the residence?”

“None. Your pilot will fly in like a homing pigeon, drop you right at the front door. And I’m assuming you’ll stay the night?”

“Perfect,” said Arnold.

For an American naval commander and former head of the entire military intelligence network, Dublin represented an unusual gap in Admiral Morgan’s experience. Until today, he had never even been there and certainly not to the great white Georgian mansion in Phoenix Park, which is home to the US ambassador.

Admiral Arnold and Kathy would occupy the magnificent suite on the second floor where President Kennedy and the first lady stayed. For a man accustomed for so many years to an iron-cased bunk in a nuclear submarine, this would not be too shabby.

And it slotted into Arnold’s plans nicely. General Lancaster and Virginia were leaving on Friday morning and would fly to Shannon Airport at 10:00 a.m. The admiral and Kathy would leave for Dublin at 6:30 p.m.

When the Kinsale group returned, Zack Lancaster joined Arnold on the terrace for a cup of tea and a report on the day’s action. He was of course delighted the admiral was dining with the
taoiseach
and was interested how quickly Jack Kirkpatrick had moved on the project.

“He doesn’t think there will be a problem getting Neil McGrath onside,” he said. “My biggest task is to persuade him he doesn’t need an act of parliament just to get it all started. Because he doesn’t. Ireland’s government is perfectly entitled to enter into a financial agreement with the United States, and indeed to have a small dockyard built in Donegal, without actually changing the laws of the land. And this one has so many plus factors he’d be nuts not to help us.”

“I agree with all of that, Arnie,” said Zack. “But you know, the thing that will sway this is Ireland’s endless affection for the United States. There’s a bond there, and it’s unbreakable.”

The admiral, after these recent months living in the old heartland of the Irish Revolution, understood the very fabric that forever links the Emerald Isle to the New World: family to family, Irish village to US state,
the shared bonds of unspeakable hardship that happened long ago, but still stand stark before everyone, the descendants of those who fled the terror and the starvation and the descendants of those who stayed, the survivors. The terrible beauty of Ireland,
still
not recovered in some remote places from the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century, still with its depleted population, yet still wishing the Americans well, with an undying affection for its blood brothers across the Atlantic Ocean.

There was a perfect example in June 1963, when Jacqueline Kennedy visited the village in County Wexford where the original Kennedy family still lived. Years later, she recalled the president’s arrival and his motorcade outside the door of the house where his ancestors were born, including his great-grandfather Patrick, who emigrated to Boston in 1848. “We were all standing in the lane,” she remembered, “when all these children came rushing out of the front gates—there must have been a dozen, all laughing and shouting. And every one of them looked just like my Jack.”

As the thirty-fifth president of the United States felt on that Irish morning, so have millions of other Americans who, down all the years, made the pilgrimage home to Ireland. Admiral Morgan knew so much more about it now, and, frankly, it was inconceivable to him that Ireland would not step up to help America deal with the oncoming Russian threat. And he reveled in the fact that it was all up to him.

And so for the next couple of days the Morgans and the Lancasters spent their time sightseeing and dining, and the admiral even accompanied the general on another fishing trip, although he refrained from casting. And, in the late afternoon of Friday, October 5, he and Kathy took off from their back lawn, bound for the Phoenix Park, as the Irish always call it.

The landing, fifty-five minutes later, right on the lawn, almost took Mrs. Morgan’s breath, staring down at the white mansion with its rounded twin ramparts on the front facade flanking a line of eight spectacular tall, arched windows. Arnold, who was by now a world expert on the history of the house, informed her casually that the Duke of Wellington, victor of Waterloo, had lived here when he was Sir Arthur Wellesley, Great Britain’s chief secretary to Ireland.

“How could you possibly know that?” she laughed. “Three days ago you’d never heard of the place.”

“I’ve told you,” he replied, “I’m a quick study. See that copse of rhododendrons
beyond the house? Winston Churchill used to ride his little donkey cart over there when he was a kid. His grandfather the Duke of Marlborough was viceroy to Ireland, and Winston’s dad, Lord Randolph, was his private secretary. This is where the family lived.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Kathy incredulously.

Arnold merely tapped the right-hand side of his nose with his forefinger, the way he usually did, when he knew he was well ahead of the game.

The uniformed copilot carried the overnight bags into the house. The US ambassador and the Irish prime minister were waiting to greet them outside the front door, but the rotors of the helicopter were making such a racket, even while just idling, that it was impossible to speak. The introductions had to wait until they had all entered the house. And since it had just started to rain, this was fortuitous.

Jack Kirkpatrick’s wife, formerly an advertising executive from Atlanta, was southern charm itself and presented the admiral and Kathy to Neil and Lizzie McGrath, Ireland’s extremely popular prime minister and his wife. The only other guests were the Irish finance minister, Jerry Mullins, who was already in the drawing room, and the extremely attractive president of Ireland, Mrs. Mary Russell (fiftyish), who was late, due, no doubt, to her living almost next door, across the park, and having access to an official car and chauffeur for only twenty-four hours a day.

In Arnold Morgan’s opinion, Ambassador Kirkpatrick had done a thoroughly brilliant job of wheeling into the room perhaps the three most influential people in the country, certainly the three he most needed on his side: the PM, the money man, and the immensely well-respected head of state.

The butler served them each a glass of champagne, and, to Arnold’s eternal gratitude, there proved to be no need for preamble and no need for lengthy explanations. Jack Kirkpatrick had spent two hours with the PM and Jerry Mullins that morning, and he knew they had briefed Mary over lunch.

Every one of them understood the context of the admiral’s proposal but not the details. Neil McGrath, a former Dublin lawyer and a cousin of the famous McGraths who founded both the Waterford Crystal/Wedgwood and the Irish Sweepstakes empire, came right to the point. “Arnold, I have explained to Jack that I see no need to change Irish law in order for a new navy base to be built in Donegal Bay,” he said. “So, therefore, if we
reach agreement, we can move very fast. There are a lot of Irishmen who would love to work on a major construction project in that part of the country. We really need the jobs.”

“Well, Neil,” said the admiral, “our proposal is that we sign a long lease with the Irish government on the land we need up there. And that we make you a proposition for the United States to take a significant share in Ireland Incorporated, and in return we initially take care of 50 percent of the national debt, which I believe is in excess of a trillion dollars.”

“You mean you’re going to pay it off for us?”

“Not quite. But we are going to take it off your hands and assume all responsibility for it. We will start paying the interest immediately. Your national debt, so far as the Irish government is concerned, is thus cut in half at the stroke of a pen.”

At this point, two things happened. Jerry Mullins started nodding so fast Arnold thought his neck might snap in half, and Mary Russell came elegantly through the door, apologizing profusely for her lateness and blaming the British prime minister for being so death-defyingly boring.

Yes, she would adore a glass of champagne, and God knows she needed it, after a half hour on the phone discussing “some tedious royal visit to Dublin by a couple of princes or princesses or whatever.” Mary Russell could not understand for the life of her why the English thought “anyone in the whole bloody world cared what the devil their princes and princesses did, and indeed what they didn’t.”

Meanwhile, Neil McGrath never missed a beat. “And then?” he asked Arnold. “What then?”

“We start the new project, pumping even more money into the Irish economy, probably up to a billion dollars in construction alone, for jetties, docks, and buildings.”

At this juncture, Arnold considered no neck could possibly stand the sheer pressure Jerry Mullins was putting on his, so fast was the finance minister nodding his profound approval for the building of the Donegal Base.

“And since at that time, the United States will effectively be 50 percent owners of the entire country,” the PM observed, “what kind of a contribution will you want from us, in return for your generosity?”

“We will assess the budgetary needs of Ireland and place that figure right at the top of the equation. And that comes right off the top of all
national income. Any surplus, we’ll take half to help with the old interest payments.”

“Aha, I couldn’t quarrel with that,” said Neil McGrath.

“And, thanks to the new base, there should be some sizable increase in government income during that first year,” added Arnold.

“I imagine you’ve considered the long term as well as the short?” the PM suggested.

“Only to the extent that for a small country like this, a trillion bucks is one heck of a lot of money,” said the admiral. “If, say, eighteen months from now, the partnership is proving financially successful for Ireland, you might consider going the whole way, handing over the debt for us to deal with and effectively becoming the fifty-first state. We’d love to have you!”

Neil McGrath smiled and whistled through his teeth, in that universal gesture that means, worldwide,
Holy shit! Are you kidding me?

“Arnold,” he said, “that would not take an act of parliament. That would take an act of God. I’m only in office for four more years—I can’t just give away the whole bloody country!”

“You would not be giving it away. Neither would you be selling it,” said the admiral. “It would be a simple merger between two compatible countries, and I venture to say it would signify unprecedented prosperity for Ireland.”

The smile on the face of the finance minister would have floodlit Croke Park. But the prime minister was deadly serious.

“I do see that, Arnold. It would, I imagine, open up all kinds of trading lanes for us, and we would no longer be beholden to the European Union and to the UK for our exports, especially mining and agriculture.”

“And with American money and engineering know-how,” said Arnold, “we’d have those two huge gas fields in Kinsale and Corrib up and running in no time. There’d be more taxes flying around than Jerry here could spend.”

“And I could visit my sister in New York without even a passport or a visa,” said Mullins. “Same currency, same phone systems, same postage rates, and tax dollars to put this place right back on its feet. The old Celtic Tiger would roar again . . . ”

“And wouldn’t that be nice?” said the PM. “Jaysus, I’m sick to death of this nation being broke.”

“Because it shouldn’t be,” added Jerry Mullins. “We have no need to
import food, we have a welfare system about one-twentieth the size of London’s, and the people here are educated properly.”

“That’s all occurred to us,” replied Arnold. “I’m just surprised no one’s thought of all this before.”

“They probably have, but wouldn’t hardly dare say it,” said the PM. “The trouble is, this kind of thing may take years, and I need to ask you, just what is it that the United States wants to do in such a hurry, and can you tell me why?”

Thus, throughout most of dinner, with Arnold Morgan helped greatly by interjections from Jack Kirkpatrick, the two Americans unfolded the somewhat chilling story of Russia’s proposed attack on the US military intelligence system as a straight reprisal for helping Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear program two years previously.