Redemption - Leon Uris [156]
“Are you comfortable here, Winston?” she asked.
“Are we alone?” Caroline nodded. “Do you have a secure telephone line to Belfast to Sir Frederick?”
“I do.”
“Can you reach him quickly?”
“We spoke this morning. He should be at Rathweed Hall all afternoon.”
“Can he make a binding decision on Ulster Militia matters in which Lord Hubble, Lord Greystone, Sir Martin Bickford, and Henry Wallaby are also involved?”
“I’m rather certain he can, but I can’t give you a hundred percent assurance.”
“Instruct your man to have Sir Frederick on standby. He might try to reach the others in the interim, so have them stay put someplace he can get to them.”
“Shouldn’t Edward Carson be party to whatever you are about to dump on me?”
“No, Carson was deliberately left out of the entire operation in order to protect him. We’ll never link Carson to this thing.”
“Good Lord, what’s going on, Winston?”
“A diabolical conspiracy is unfolding. A thousand-ton German vessel carrying heavy German weapons, artillery, shells, etcetera, etcetera, has made its way directly to Ulster. Our destroyer Battersea tailed as a decoy ship. We believe the commander of the Battersea is involved in the plot. At any rate, the ship holding the weaponry entered Lough Foyle flying an Ulster Militia flag and unloaded at your husband’s dock in Londonderry. The weapons were transferred to a waiting line of freight cars and flatbeds, then moved into Lettershambo Castle in broad daylight.”
Caroline rolled her eyes and blew a long breath. Oh, why did she love her daddy so fiercely? “Sounds like Roger and Freddie, all right. Bickford, Wallaby, Greystone, all charter members of the old boys’ club. Yes, they could chunk in that kind of money. What the hell, Winston, they would not have done something this blatant unless they were dead certain they could get away with it. The way they’ve gotten the English people up in arms in the past three months and made no move to stop them, something like this was bound to happen.”
Churchill drummed his finger elegantly on her desk top and looked down. “It is not totally clear yet, Caroline, but it seems that your son, Captain Christopher Hubble, ran the ship in.”
After the first flash of terror came another wave and yet another. She sprung from her chair and muttered to unhearing gods. Once she got the thunder of it calmed, an off-scale tone poem of confusion and fear jumbled together.
“Is he under arrest?” she finally brought herself to ask.
“Well, certainly the boy’s father and grandfather were going to see that he was covered…if indeed it was Christopher. The gunrunning was only one phase of the scheme.”
Caroline realized it was going to be a very hard hour. She did what was necessary to gather her faculties and beckoned him to go on. Winston asked permission to light a cigar and she smiled.
“The object of this exercise is to put the Liberals into a trap. At my insistence, Asquith had an order issued that the forces at Camp Bushy, mainly the Midlanders and the Coleraines, go on standby to occupy vital facilities and declare Ulster under martial law.”
“They’re playing awfully rough,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Brigadier Brodhead was obviously in on the whole thing from its inception.”
“That follows. Roger and Freddie have made him wealthy on tips, to say nothing of the fact that he is pre-Neanderthal when it comes to empire.”
“To go on,” Churchill continued, “Brodhead not only refused to obey the order, but he tendered his resignation and obtained the resignations of all one hundred and fifty-some officers at Camp Bushy.”
“That’s an out-and-out mutiny.”
“We have a little time to sort things out. Bushy is sealed off and thus far, no news of the resignations.”
“And these are my people, the men of my life. They are not normal when it comes to Ulsterism. If you and I held this conversation