Free the Savage Day - Simon Vaughn 02 (v5) by Jack Higgins

Murphy was standing at the wheel, her face disembodied in the compass light.
    'How are things going?' I asked.
    'Fine. There's been a sea running for about half an hour now.'
    I glanced out. 'Likely to get worse before it gets better. I'll take over.'
    She made way for me, her body brushing mine as we squeezed past each other. 'I don't think I could sleep now if I wanted to.'
    'All right,' I said. 'Make some more tea and come back. Things might get interesting. And check the forecast on the radio.'
    I increased speed, racing the heavy weather that threatened from the east and the waves grew rougher, rocking Kathleen from side to side. Visibility was rotten, utter darkness on every hand except for a slight phosphorescence from the sea. Norah Murphy seemed to be taking her time, but when she returned, she brought more bacon sandwiches as well as the tea.
    'The forecast wasn't too bad,' she said. 'Wind moderating, intermittent rain squalls.'
    'Anything else?'
    'Some fog patches towards dawn, but nothing to worry about.'
    I helped myself to a sandwich. 'How's the boy wonder?'
    She didn't like that, I could see, but she kept her temper and handed me a mug. 'He's sitting up now in the saloon. I gave him tea with something in it. He'll be all right.'
    'Let's hope so. He could be needed.'
    She said, 'Let me tell you about Binnie Gallagher, Major Vaughan. During the rioting that broke out in Belfast in August 1969 an Orange mob led by B Specials would have burned the Falls Road to the ground, chased out every Catholic family who lived there - or worse. They were prevented by a handful of IRA men who took to the streets led by Michael Cork himself.'
    'The Small Man again? And Binnie was one of that lot?'
    'Don't tell me you're actually impressed?'
    'Oh, but I am,' I said. 'They did a hell of a good job that night, those men. A great ploy, as my mother would have said. And Binnie was one of them? He must have been all of sixteen.'
    'He was staying with an aunt in the area. She gave him an old revolver, a war souvenir of her dead husband's, and Binnie went in search of the Small Man. Fought at his right hand during the whole of that terrible night. He's been his shadow ever since. His most trusted aide.'
    'Which explains why he guards the great man's niece.' She lit a couple of cigarettes and passed one to me. I said, 'How does an American come to be mixed up in all this anyway?'
    'It's simple enough. My father spent around seventeen years in one kind of British prison or another, if you add up all his sentences. I was thirteen when he was finally released and we emigrated to the States to join my Uncle Michael. A new life, so we thought, but too late for my father. He was a sick man when they released him. He died three years later.'
    'And you never forgave them?'
    'They might as well have hanged him.'
    'And you decided you ought to take up where he left off?'
    'We have a right to be free,' she said. 'The people of Ulster have been denied their nationhood too long.'
    It sounded like the first two sentences of some ill-written political pamphlet and probably was.
    I said, 'Look, what happened in August '69 was a bad business, which was exactly why the Army was brought in. To protect the Catholic minority while the necessary political changes were put in hand, and it was working until the IRA got up to their old tricks again.'
    'I wonder what your uncle would have thought if he could have heard you say that.'
    'The dear old Schoolmaster of Stradballa?' I said. 'Binnie's particular hero? The saint who wouldn't see the children harmed at any price? He doesn't exist. He's a myth. No revolutionary leader could act like he was supposed to and survive.'
    'What are you trying to say?' she said.
    'Amongst other things, that he had at least forty people executed, including several British officers, in reprisal for the execution of IRA men - a pretty dubious action morally, I would have thought. On one particularly unsavoury occasion, he was