Power Play (42 page)

“We know what they’re doing, and we know how they plan to achieve it,” said Arnold. “But we do not wish to bring half the world to the brink of war. And this Russian operation could move out of the Barents Sea on a big freighter at any time.

“That would include missiles with nuclear warheads, guidance systems, mobile launchers, and electronic jammers to dismantle the president’s communications. And we intend to destroy it, but quietly and secretly.”

“At sea, presumably?” asked the PM. “Before the freighter gets to the launch site?”

“Precisely,” replied the admiral. “And we have one major problem. That ship will pull out of Murmansk in the middle of the night. SOSUS won’t pinpoint it for a few days. But when it does, we need to move real quick. And our hardware is just too far away. We need it right here on a northeastern shore of the Atlantic Ocean . . . ”

“And that’s where we come in, eh?” said Neil McGrath. “You want an American base, right here in Donegal, US warships within fast strike range of the rogue freighter.”

“You got it,” said Arnold.

Finally, the prime minister of Ireland made some kind of judgment. “Look, boys,” he said, conspiratorially, “I have been asked for a major favor by the United States of America. And it’s a favor I cannot refuse, because it’s in the interest of world peace and prosperity. Whether we like it or not, we all live behind the powerful protection of the USA, and sometimes we take that for granted.

“No Irish government in my judgment could say no to the Americans on this. It’s our duty; it’s our chance to offer something for the common good. I’m going to say right now: that navy base can be built. It can start right away, because one of the undisputed powers I do have is that of compulsory purchase.

“The Irish government owns quite a lot of the ground you require, and I can make that available. Anything needs buying up, from anyone, I can do that—provided I have your word that the USA will compensate us for the cash outlays.”

“You have our word,” said Admiral Morgan. “Right, Jack?”

The US ambassador confirmed the deal.

Neil McGrath said immediately, “I will have contracts drawn up over the weekend, which will demonstrate that all the land you require is being placed in the formal ownership of the Irish government, and there will be a ninety-nine-year lease issued to the USA on that land, with full building rights and shoreline permits issued forthwith.”

“You can do all that yourself?” asked Jack Kirkpatrick. “Without so much as a word in parliament?”

“The job of parliament is to change laws and pass laws,” said Neil McGrath. “It does not need to concern itself with activities that require neither. I am empowered to enter into contracts with any nation, and I am certainly able to step forward to help our American friends, any way I may wish.”

A full round of applause broke out for the Irish prime minister in the ornate and perfectly lit dining room.

And, from the high dining-room walls of the US Embassy, the superb portraits of two beloved Americans, both with unbreakable Irish roots, stared down with obvious approval . . . from Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, the fortieth president, Ronald Reagan, and from Dunganstown, County Wexford, the thirty-fifth, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

By Tuesday morning, October 9, the Irish government had reacted with extraordinary speed to the American request. Along the Donegal shore at the eastern end of the bay every household was advised of the new development—that the Irish government was building a new ferry terminal to take the pressure off the Killybegs jetties.

There were only five occupied properties that were affected. And every one of them objected, until, under Admiral Morgan’s edict, they were offered the full market price, plus $150,000 each, at which point every one of them changed their minds.

The government owned the rest of the required shoreline, and Neil McGrath had four lawyers working right through the weekend drawing up a lease for the US Navy, which allowed it to build initially a fifteen-hundred-foot jetty with a short seventy-five-yard stretch of tarmac road leading down to it.

It also issued permission for three major buildings to be constructed, though none of them could be more than two stories high, which would protect the water views from all the surrounding land. The government undertook to order the electric company, the Irish natural gas corporation, and the water board to bring central supply into the developed area immediately. All three utilities would stand by to lay pipes and cables, under Irish government instruction.

The lease further permitted two more piers to be built over time, one
of them five hundred feet long that could be situated one hundred feet offshore, parallel to the main jetty, thus forming a narrow channel, which could be roofed to provide a submarine shelter from prying satellites. None of this would, of course, ever be made public.

Neil McGrath also recruited the chief executive of one of the major Irish waterfront heavy-industry corporations, Harris Pye Dry Dock, to come in and assist the Americans with advice on new buildings, naval repair facilities, dry-docking, and ultimately to harness a part of its one-hundred-strong workforce to lead the way in the construction. Harris Pye, located near Alexandra Quay on the Port of Dublin’s North Wall, would be a regular calling spot for Admiral Morgan throughout the coming months.

Privately, Neil McGrath’s old friend at the world-renowned Dublin harbor corporation believed the Americans would end up bringing in a floating dry dock—a huge pontoon with floodable buoyancy chambers. These are controlled by enormous valves that, when opened, cause the dock to stand lower in the water and allow a submarine to float in.

When the chambers are pumped dry, the water runs out, and the entire edifice rises up, leaving the ship on giant wood supports, ready for repairs or servicing. Harris Pye would undertake the construction of this dock because naval bases need one, especially the Americans, trying to operate so far from home.

The US Embassy in Dublin made copies of the lease to be sent immediately to Admiral Mark Bradfield in Washington and to the project chief, Admiral Morgan in Clonakilty. Subject to US approval, construction was to begin in the third week in October, with two huge cranes on floating barges hauling in the long steel piles, which would be driven into the seabed.

Tons of steel for the giant sheet-pile “walls” would be purchased from Irish corporations, all to be driven down into the water to form the ultimate “box” from which the water would be pumped out and refilled with stone and concrete. The speed at which this can be achieved is dependent entirely on the size of the workforce and the availability of heavy machinery, diggers, bulldozers, trucks, and jackhammers. So far as the US Navy was concerned, there was no limit, either financial or in gathering the major machinery.

Four senior consultants were there from Harland and Wolff, builders of the
Titanic
more than one hundred years ago in the Belfast shipyards, less than ninety miles away to the east. All four of them were experts on dock construction and crane capacity, Harland and Wolff being proprietors of the two largest gantry cranes in the world, “Samson” and “Goliath,” which stand at well over three hundred feet tall in their cotton socks.

The orders snapped out daily from Clonakilty, mostly along the lines of,
Fine, just get it done . . . No delays . . . And I don’t care if it does cost another fifty bucks a ton . . . Son, right here we’re in a war situation . . . So far as I’m concerned, that jetty is life and death to the USA . . . Just build the sonofabitch . . . and build it now, hear me?

In the end, everyone got Admiral Morgan’s drift. There was urgency, which is sometimes rare in Ireland. They had the approach road down and concreted in ten days. The giant jackhammers were already pounding the steel piles into the floor of the bay; a convoy of trucks bearing thirty-five tons of rock at a time was coming in, thanks to some slick organization by McMonagle Stone of Mountcharles. The barges were moored offshore, laden with steel, and with cranes working from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Diggers were cutting out channels for the utility supply lines. The great triumph of the operation was that the entire thing was, and seemed, Irish. There was no trace of a greenback or a US flag or a US corporation, and certainly nothing to suggest the United States Navy was anywhere near the construction site.

Deliberately, Admiral Morgan had ensured no US Navy personnel was in attendance. There were, of course, senior naval construction engineers visiting, but never in uniform, always in regular working clothes, wearing standard Irish hard hats on site.

So far as the US Navy knew, there was no Russian satellite surveillance trained on the Irish west coast, where there was no Irish Naval presence and never had been. A new local ferry terminal in Donegal was as interesting to the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet as the annual Galway Oyster Festival.

The first and only major setback came on November 3, one day after the first steel pilings were hammered into the seabed. That was the day the East Donegal Bay Oyster and Shellfish Association mutinied and turned up in force in Donegal Town’s District Court Office on Bridge Street.

Armed with two lawyers and a petition with twenty-three names on it, they sought an injunction to prevent any further work on the proposed ferry terminal that, they claimed, would endanger their livelihoods, pollute the crystal waters of Donegal Bay, and destroy shellfish life in the immediate area. The terminal, they claimed, was illegal, unnecessary, and a blight on both the land and the seascape.

By early afternoon they had succeeded in getting their case before a magistrate, who reminded them they were coming up against the owners of the land, which happened to be the Irish government. “I cannot allow an application for an easement on this project on the basis that it’s against the law,” he told them. “Not when the defendant will be the government of Ireland, which, indeed, is the law.”

He informed the petitioners there would be a one-month adjournment while he sought advice on the possible damage to the environment and whether there was a chance of compensation for the five principals, the shellfishermen who believed both the mollusks and their livelihoods would be gone.

While the clerk to the magistrates informed the government of the problem, the petitioners made their way to the village of Bruckless, where, in the shadow of the great round church tower, they unfurled banners and marched to the construction site, led by the oysterman Tom O’Toole from Mountcharles.

They stood for a half hour and chanted
FERRY PORT . . . FERRY PORT—NO! NO! NO!
while the massive JCB hydraulic buckets hauled sand and shale out of the foreshore in readiness for the two-ton hunks of granite that would replace it.

At this point it started to rain, and Tom O’Toole immediately led his little army of protesters directly to the village pub, the Mary Murrins, to celebrate a day of “mighty achievement.”

“We showed ’em today, lads,” he said as the barman drew their pints of Guinness. “Showed ’em that ferry port will be completed over our dead bodies, so it will.”

His deputy, Padraic Treacy from Dunkineely, added darkly, “And if they ignore us, we’ll start blowing the place up.” Padraic was essentially unaware of the small company of United States Marines, currently on their way to act as permanent guards to the new facility—just as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Ronan O’Callaghan moved out of their sizable house and
provided the first accommodations for non-Irish residents. This was expected in the next few days, the Irish couple having accepted a full two hundred thousand dollars over the market price to be gone within ten days.

Meanwhile, Neil McGrath had informed Admiral Morgan of the mutiny in Bruckless Town (population 184) and asked him whether he’d pay to bring in lawyers and have them mount a legal defense. The courts would hold the civil case up for a minimum of six months.

“Hell, no,” replied the admiral. “Buy ’em off.”

“There are about five of them involved in the main part of the claim,” said the PM. “The estimate is they make forty thousand euros a year, except for last year, when the oysters got some bloody affliction called red tide and dropped dead in their shells.”

“Okay, we’ll buy them out,” said the admiral. “Offer each man a half million for his business. And tell ’em we’ll rent it all back to them for a dollar a year. If they can still fish, that’ll kill the charge we’ve screwed up the shellfish beds.”

“Good idea,” said the PM. “I’ll send someone up there to make the offer on behalf of the government.”

And so it was that an Irish government lawyer arrived at the world headquarters of the East Donegal Bay Oyster and Shellfish Association, the Mary Murrins in Bruckless, to try to sink the protest beneath a rising tide of cash.

Tom O’Toole rose to introduce the lawyer to the small gathering, but could not resist a small, impassioned commercial before he did so. “We realize,” he said, “you will have come here with various propositions intended to despoil our magnificent Donegal coastline. But I should issue this warning right now, that no amount of money, intended as either a bribe or compensation, will be acceptable to any of us. This is a protest of conscience, in defense of our beautiful and historic land, and there are not enough dollar bills in all the world to wrest from us this priceless asset and this traditional way of life.”

At which point, the government lawyer, Dermot O’Brien, rose from his chair and stated, “Then this meeting will end very swiftly. But I am instructed to offer each one of you the sum of five hundred thousand dollars to cover your losses.”

“I’ll take that,” called out Padraic Treacy, the local czar of the periwinkle flats. “That’ll do very nicely to stave off the coming hardship.”

“I’ll take it as well,” added Tom O’Toole. “That’s a fair offer, sir. You’re a gentleman.”