Author's Foreword

FACT OR FICTION?

Most conspiracies require a few hard facts to give respectability to the rumours that grow or that are seeded.

This book is entirely fictional, but the setting is factual.

The capture of the occupants of the US embassy in Tehran on 4^th November 1979 is well documented, as are the events that followed. The extraordinarily brave attempt by the US forces to free them is also a matter of record and I would like to recommend the book The Guts to Try written by Colonel James H Kyle as a brilliant factual account of what happened. I have used this as my main source where real events have formed the setting for my story, and indeed I have quoted from it by way of introduction.

I did consider changing the names of the military personnel who carried out the mission, to emphasise the fictional story I wished to compose but ultimately this seemed to me to be disrespectful to their memory, and thus I hope I cause no offence by including them in my book. Clearly, when I have described his or her words during the mission, this is the product of my imagination and is not intended to be taken literally by anyone.

The claim made by the Iranians to have found the bodies of nine soldiers is a matter of fact and was widely reported at the time by the US media.

Similarly, the effect of the crisis and the fall-out of its failure is a matter of record. Here, I have primarily used the excellent Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency by Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief adviser, as a reference for what happened, and indeed his book is quoted by one of my fictional characters and proves to be the source of his eventual unravelling of the story.

My aim throughout has been to entertain without trampling on the memories, achievements and sacrifices of the men and women behind Operation Eagle Claw. I truly hope I have succeeded in this aim.

Finally, I hope the reader will take a moment to
reflect on what happened out in the Iranian desert at the location known as Desert-1 and remember the eight men whose lives were lost, as listed below. To undertake a mission that involved flying into the heart of Iran, driving lorries and coaches into Tehran, fighting off the Iranian guard, freeing fifty-three hostages held in two locations and then capturing a local airport and flying the hostages home – this took guts and professionalism, which I have grown to admire and respect during every part of my research into this story.

This fictional book – The Carter Conspiracy – is dedicated to all of them, and to the US President who had the guts to try.

Died in action: -

Captain Richard Bakke

Captain Harold Lewis

Captain Lyn McIntosh

Captain Charles McMillan

Sergeant John Harvey

Sergeant Dewey Johnson

Sergeant Joel Mayo

Corporal George Holmes

Preface

“The desert in front of me was a boiling exploding inferno. I was transfixed by horror. The two burning aircraft, an H-53 helicopter and a C-130 tanker, resembled prehistoric monsters locked in mortal combat. Red-hot chunks of streaking metal painted incandescent lines across the landscape. Jet fuel, bullets, grenades and missiles were the ingredients.”

25 April 1980 – “Desert-1” West of Tabas Central Iran

The RH-53D Sea Stallion was the workhorse of the US Navy. It had two essential strengths for the mission known as “Eagle Claw”. Firstly, it had a range of 750 miles when auxiliary tanks were fitted. Secondly, the rotor blades and tail folded so that it could be stored and moved around an aircraft carrier. Desert One was approximately 700 miles from the USS Nimitz, from which the helicopters had launched.

The Sea Stallion also had an Achilles Heel. Due to its bulk, especially when fully laden, the helicopter was best suited to take-off from a “ground taxiing” manoeuvre. This involved the ‘copter starting off by accelerating across the ground, like an aircraft on a runway to boost the insufficient lift produced by the aluminium rotor blades. However, ground taxiing is not easy on sand, even the compacted kind that lay beneath the wheels of Helios 3, the code name of the Sea Stallion piloted by Marine Major Jim Schaefer.

Schaefer was unable to coax the helicopter into rolling forward. This did not cause him any real concern; he simply elected to lift off vertically and “air-taxi”. In this manoeuvre, the engines produce enough thrust to haul the helicopter off the ground up to about twenty feet but no more. You need forward movement to climb higher.

As Schaefer applied the power, Helios 3 lifted off the ground. No one is certain about what happened in the next few seconds – except that the take-off produced a mini-sandstorm that blurred the vision of those on the ground.

He was commander of Delta Force, the elite counter-terrorist unit formed by the US military at his urging. His recollection is that instead of moving forwards and upwards, the Sea Stallion drifted horizontally, slightly backwards and to the right where it crashed down onto the left wing of a parked C-130 Hercules transport plane. As the wing buckled, the fuel stored within ignited. The resulting explosion had two memorable characteristics. The first of these was the noise – a huge thump that rocked the desert floor. The second was the fireball, the flames reaching three or four hundred feet up into the sky.

In the resulting blaze, the 0.50-calibre ammunition from the helicopter started to explode, joined shortly after by the missiles, grenades and combat ammunition stored on the plane.

Aboard the Hercules, the fourteen crew members and the Delta Force soldiers scrambled to escape. The plane had arrived at Desert One with a huge rubber bladder fitted inside its cargo bay containing the fuel to refill the helicopters that had rendezvous’d on their way to Teheran. Because only six of the expected eight ‘copters had arrived, the bladder was still far from empty – and it was on this perilous “floor lining” that the Delta men were standing as the plane began to burn.

Major Logan Fitch, Commander of “Delta White”, was the senior officer in the hold.

“My men shouted, staggered, stumbled onto the hot bladder. They fell over and clawed one another in their desperation to escape.”

These were not men one would expect to panic. But with gallons of highly flammable fuel under their feet and little prospect of escape, panic they did. The left side door led straight into the inferno. The only way out was through the right hand door in agonisingly slow single file. Even Fitch was infected by the hysteria.

“I had figured to be the last off – but changed my mind. If I was going to stay alive, I was gonna have to move. I entered the stream of men moving toward the door. I pulled myself up, after being knocked down, then was flat on the floor again. Then at last I was out and on the ground, this time knocked flat by the men jumping down after me.”

As they exited, many of the soldiers had to roll in the desert sand to put out the fires on their clothing.

Despite the cacophony of the explosions, one of the men from Delta Force heard bloodcurdlingly anguished screams for help. They came from the aircraft’s radio operator too badly burned to move, let alone get out of the plane. Sergeant Paul Lawrence turned back. Using discarded uniforms to shield himself from the flames, he dashed back into the cargo hold, ignoring the threat to his life that lay in every ammunition box on the floor of the plane, and hauled the screaming man out of the plane.

The Sea Stallion had come to rest on top of the Hercules’ flight deck. While the tail section of the ‘copter burned with the combination of its own fuel and that from the wing of the plane, the cockpit remained momentarily intact enabling Schaefer and his co-pilot to scramble to safety through the cockpit window, tumbling down the curved nose of the burning Hercules like children playing on a slide. For the other three crew members, further back in the helicopter, there was no hope and they perished in the flames.

The ‘copter’s final resting position was a death sentence for the Hercules Commander, his co-pilot, two navigators and the flight engineer. They had all been on the flight deck preparing for take-off. The impact of the crash caused the stairs from the deck to the exit to collapse, sealing them in. They too burned to death.

Operation Eagle Claw had become a fiasco, one that would bring down the President of the USA.

May 9, 1980 – Arlington Amphitheatre

President Jimmy Carter presided over the memorial service for the eight men killed at Desert One. The Iranians had returned their charred bodies, but only after they had sent pictures around the world of their desecration by the Iranian military.

For the lost men’s families, though, the service brought some degree of peace and closure after the horror of those pictures and the loss of their sons, fathers and brothers.

Uplifted by the pride the bereaved found in what the men had strived to achieve, President Jimmy Carter ensured that there was no talk of waste, incompetence or tragedy. That was to come later.

At the end of the service, a squadron of planes flew overhead. One broke out of the formation and soared symbolically towards the heavens. Carter’s eyes welled up in grief for the fallen men.

As the ceremony at Arlington continued, so did the activity at the site of the carnage. All who were at the scene smiled and walked around with an air of triumphant amusement.

The Americans had left behind five Sea Stallions and the Iranian military were still examining them and working out how to fly them to the nearest secure airfield. Extraordinarily, the pilots had also left classified documents inside each helicopter, including detailed notes on the planned attack on the compound where the fifty-three hostages were being held. The Americans had infiltrated spies into Teheran and contacted Iranians still sympathetic to the Shah. Their safety was badly compromised by the abandonment of these documents.

A request had been communicated from the retreating US forces to bomb the five ‘copters (It was later claimed that this was why no thought was given to gathering in key information!). In fact, the commander of the ground forces did not know that these files had been brought along and had thus done nothing to order their removal. The request for a bombing sortie was turned down by the White House.

To the side of the site, the breeze drifted the sand onto a small and newly formed mound, beneath which was buried the remains of a ninth American. The makeshift grave was unmarked; the body unnamed.

The Iranians had been bemused at the Americans’ insistence that only eight soldiers perished. Even when they announced to the world that they had found nine bodies, there was no reaction or requests for further information. Their claims were dismissed by the US President and the country’s media adopted a similar disbelieving tone.

At first, they assumed that this ninth man was a spy or even an Iranian dissident returning to help the troops. The lack of a dog tag around the man’s neck supported this view and they assumed that the Americans were unable to admit publicly that he existed. They suspected that a second unofficial approach would be made to them to recover the body – but even when they hinted that they were prepared to return it, they were met with the same response: there is no one else missing; there is no ninth body.

Eventually, they decided to leave the body where it was found and to focus on the critical hostage negotiations that were still ongoing.

Chapter 1

The Jedi Knight

Maria Consuella had seen many odd sights on the streets of Washington, but never before had she seen a Star Wars Jedi Knight walking towards her with the familiar white cords of an iPod headphone standing out against the darkness of the hooded cloak that billowed like a sail in the wind.

Maria was a naturalised American of Spanish descent. Her parents had moved to the US in the 1920s, just in time to lose everything they had in the great depression.

She had never been a woman of beauty and her most striking feature – her head of shining black hair – was now the product of a slightly peculiar hair dye, an orangey-red colour beloved by elderly American women.

Her main pleasure in life was now food and this showed in her waistline, or more specifically in her lack of one. She was rotund and her feet were beginning to swell.

Maria’s encounter took place on the streets of the diplomatic district near Rock Creek Park. For nearly forty years, she had attended to the needs of the Slinger family, whose large manorial house stood on the corner of two quiet streets. The house had a faded but homely appearance. It was unusual in the area, mainly because it was still a private residence while all the neighbouring properties were embassies or diplomatic residences. Maria had not heard of some of the countries represented and she often wondered why governments spent a small fortune on their US embassy while thousands starved to death at home. The house was also unusual in still being surrounded by its own garden. Most of the other gardens in the neighbourhood had been turned into annexes or car parks.

Initially, her job had been to look after the four children. Maria loved them all as if they were her own. She was unaffected by their arrogance and selfishness and the slightly demeaning way in which they talked to her. In her eyes, they could do no wrong. Anyway, all four had long since grown up and moved out and now she was responsible only for looking after Mrs Slinger, an eighty-eight-year-old widow who amazed her physicians by remaining alive despite being afflicted by a plethora of illnesses.

Maria would relieve the night nurse at 8.30am – they would take breakfast together and discuss the television shows from the previous evening. She would then help Mrs Slinger rise and settle her into her chair in front of the enormous TV set linked by satellite to hundreds of useless channels. Lunch was always served on a tray and the food had to be easily digestible and accompanied by a glass of wine. In the afternoon, Maria would clean and watch TV on the small portable set in the kitchen. Supper was taken in the dining room beneath the large and stunningly beautiful painting of a young Mrs Slinger. The working day ended at 7pm when the night nurse returned.

The job was stressful. Yet also boring.

The sight of the Jedi Knight cheered her up and she entered the property with a smile – realising instantly how rare and nice this was.

The Jedi Knight meanwhile walked on – also with a broad smile on his face inspired caused by the tune playing on his iPod: An Englishman in New York by Sting. Dom Clement Appleberry was indeed an Englishman, whose mind had wandered to the conclusion that Sting chose New York for his song and not Washington solely because his song had two notes to fill with a US city name and few if any worked. In fact the only two-syllable US city Clem could think of was Denver and he doubted whether a song called Englishman in Denver would have had quite the same impact.

Notwithstanding this, he was amusingly trying to re-word the song to fit his current location when he saw a Hispanic woman, aged about sixty, observing him with a strange and bemused expression on her face. Dom Clem was used to this. As a Benedictine monk, he wore a black heavy linen cassock, which stretched down to his feet. The garment also included a hood, which was only drawn up over the head during prayers – or when it rained!

Shoe styles were optional. Most of his colleagues back at the monastery in Somerset, England wore open-toed sandals. Clem found them cold and clichéd, instead favouring traditional black brogues, which his eldest sister bought him from Church’s in London – a traditional and well-known manufacturer of hand-made leather shoes. At a cost of £300 a pair, these were really too ostentatious for the order and frequently drew comments from the abbot. He just about got away with wearing them because they had been a present and his sister loved the irony that her pious brother wore shoes made by “the Church”!

The other striking feature about the monk was his physique. Most people expect monks to be meek men with tiny bodies and quiet voices. Six feet and an inch tall with a chest built on the rugby fields of school and the training grounds of the army, Dom Clem was quite the opposite. His love of rowing and cycling had maintained this impressive frame and built up his thigh and arm muscles. Most of this was disguised by the cassock, but on his days off, dressed in “civvies” few could guess his occupation.

His face on the other hand was more like a little boy’s. When wreathed in one of the widest and most relaxed smiles imaginable, there was no doubt that Clem was a ladies’ dream. Which of course it had to be – a dream that is – for Benedictine monks take a vow of chastity and this is an absolute.

As the song ended, Dom Clem’s mind drifted back to the matter in hand, to the purpose of his walk through the streets of west Washington. He was on his way to give the last rites to a wealthy American – to sit with him and watch him die.

Chapter 2

The English Monk

Dom Clem was not a typical monk. Unlike most of his fellow Benedictines, Clem had lived a “previous” existence before taking holy orders. This previous life resulted from a fairly ordinary childhood.

His parents were a loving and relaxed couple. Dad had been a civil servant all his life, working for HM Customs and Excise. He had been involved in the Second World War, but due to a smattering of Jewishness, he was held back from call up until 1940. Clem used to love listening to his war stories – how Dad landed on the Normandy beaches in a jeep driven straight off a ship onto one of the pontoons built by the Royal Corps of Engineers. How he had entered Brussels shortly after liberation and stayed behind to the continued adulation of the occupants while the troops pressed on with their attack. Ensconced in the town hall, he had been taken to the cellars and was shown a secret passage leading to a hidden collection of Bordeaux wine. He drank nothing else throughout his stay. In short, Dad had a “good” war and as far as Clem could make out, had not fired a single shot in action.

His mother was very different. An Irish Catholic from a poor farm in the west of Ireland, she had left home during the war – leaving behind a neutral country – and travelled to England, where she joined the nursing corps and encountered nightly bombing raids. Mum was stubborn and ambitious, argumentative and self-possessed. Clem took after his mother.

Clem, who was christened Patrick and called Paddy (monks take an adopted name on ordination, usually in recognition of an admired and inspirational saint) was sent away to a Catholic boarding school at the age of seven. During his five years at this prep school, he developed a number of traits and characteristics that would subsequently dictate the course of his life.

The first of these was the dominance of Catholicism over every aspect of school life: Mass three times a week, religious teaching twice a week and the application of the strict moral values that underlie the faith.

The others came from his stubbornness and love of arguing, which made him universally unpopular throughout his stay. That led to being bullied, which meant that Paddy learned how to fight and, more crucially, when not to fight.

It also led him to develop his own ideas and beliefs when logical counter arguments were not or could not be put to him. This began to manifest itself in better academic results, his teachers amazed at the brazenness of some of his essays arguing against their teachings yet impressed that one so young could and did use rational and logical thought so effectively.

So it was that, at the age of twelve, Paddy passed his Common Entrance exam and moved to Downside, a public school near Bath.

Downside school was run by and linked to a Benedictine monastery. It was one of the top Catholic schools in England, so Clem’s mother was incredibly proud – both of Paddy’s achievement in getting in and of her achievement in transforming her life from that of an Irish farmer’s daughter to that of a Downside parent.

During his time at the school, Paddy’s passionate Catholicism began to wane as the monks failed to answer his questions or counter his arguments logically. Surely, he argued, Darwin disproved much of the Old Testament. “We’re descended from crawling fish, not from Adam and his Mrs”, he once wrote an essay arguing that if there was a single creator, then he did not deserve worship when so much of his creation caused misery and suffering. He didn’t necessarily believe this to be true, but was disappointed at the weakness of the monks’ and teachers’ response.

His growing passion was the school’s Combined Cadet Force, combining corps from the army, navy and RAF. This was a Wednesday afternoon activity, a time of no lessons and no sport. The CCF was supported by the real armed forces and involved guns, manoeuvres, uniforms and every other attribute of the military that appealed to little boys. By his final year, Paddy was the leader of the whole corps. He loved the order and logic of it all and especially revelled in his ability to lead without being questioned.

By the time his A-level year came around, Paddy was being urged to apply to Oxford or Cambridge University. It was important for the school to see its best pupils move to these institutions as the achievement reflected well on the teachers and would always feature prominently in the school prospectus. Paddy’s mother had already started boasting to her friends about how he had to choose between the two.

However, she had passed on to Paddy her contrariness and he decided that the two universities were not for him. He disliked the libertarian way of life, the lack of structure and the rarefied image they projected. He had also become sick of his mother’s boasting and wanted to make a point to her.

So he joined the army.

There was, at this time, a well-worn career path adopted by the British upper classes for their children, depending upon their academic competence. The brightest and best became doctors and surgeons, especially those who took Latin as an A-level. The rest of the really bright children would become lawyers or accountants, training for their qualifications at one of the many city firms where Daddy had connections.

At the other end of the scale, the intellectually challenged had to be catered for. Those with personality became estate agents, which explains the wonderfully eccentric English surnames emblazoned even today on the boards of leading agents. Those with aptitude but little personality went to Agricultural College and then into “Land Management” – often a euphemism for running Daddy’s estate.

Those unsuited to either career tended to join the army as an officer. Clem realised that he would stand out in this group – and he liked the juxtaposition of his academic brilliance with the career path he chose.

The army couldn’t quite believe its luck. Paddy went straight to Sandhurst and six months later was presented with the Sword of Honour by the Queen – the award for the best student. This earned his mother’s forgiveness for not going to “Oxbridge” as she looked on with tears of pride in her eyes while the Queen enjoyed a short conversation with Junior Officer Patrick Appleberry.

From Sandhurst, it was usual for future regular officers – career army men and women rather than those on a short term commission – to transfer to Old College, still based at Sandhurst, where they would embark on a course of studies in subjects such as military history, politics and international affairs. This proved to be a bit of a bore for Paddy, as the course was designed for non-graduates and was incredibly basic. He was saved by a growing extra-curricular interest in the use and impact of weapons and the changing and rapidly developing effect these were having on military tactics and competence. Paddy soon began to question the current military tactics that they were being taught, arguing that tactics had to change as rapidly as new technologies and types of weapon appeared.

His end of term report by the commander labelled him as awkward but potentially brilliant.

He was then sent on a six-month troop leadership course at Bovington, a military town in the middle of southern England, after which he was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Hussars.

Over the next seven years, Paddy enjoyed all that was good and bad about life in the army. The Hussars’ posting to Northern Ireland for five months in 1979 caused his mother many sleepless night worrying about her son. The fact that he was engaged in a battle against a group representing Irish Catholics did not overly concern her for the simple reason that, like the majority of Irish people at that time, she had grown tired of the conflicts in the North and despaired over the damage being caused to the reputation of her wonderful and friendly country.

It was during this term of duty that Paddy killed his first human being. It was a strange event all round. For a start he was not on duty when it happened. Six months into the tour, he had been due some leave and decided to drive across Ireland to his mother’s home town – Kenmare in County Kerry. He knew that this would not be allowed by his superiors and of course he was conscious that he might be attacked in the Republic if anyone knew who he was or where he was posted. Oddly this just added to the excitement of the whole exercise, which Paddy proceeded to plan with the help of that old cliché – military precision.

So it was that one spring evening, he came to be heading for the Irish border in a borrowed car with Irish registration plates – he believed it was safer to drive an Irish car in Northern Ireland than a Northern Irish car in the Republic.

As he drove south, his mind wandered to the vacation – how he planned to visit the seven pairs of aunts and uncles who still lived in Kenmare and he wondered how many of his thirty-one cousins he would recognise. As he approached the border crossing point just south of Middletown, his mood changed and his body tensed. As he joined the queue of cars waiting to be searched by the soldiers, his attention was drawn to the behaviour of three men in the white Ford Escort in front of him, where an argument seemed to be going on between one of the men in the front and one of the men in the back of the car. Both cars moved forward as the soldiers completed their search of a van ahead.

Paddy watched as one of the men in the back of the car opened his door and got out. He was short and podgy, wearing a typical Irish farmer’s peaked cap and a large black duffel coat. He looked straight at Paddy, then at the registration plates of the car, and then back to Paddy. As the man turned and opened the car’s hatchback, Paddy saw him lift the rear carpet and rummage in the area where the spare wheel is normally stored. Using his body to block Paddy’s view the man lifted something out of a bag and passed it over the back seat to the man in front. Something else was retrieved and shoved inside the folds of the duffel coat before the man got back into the car.

What most impressed the officers that conducted the subsequent inquiry into the incident was that despite having seen no weapons and observed what could easily have been a man getting some snacks out of the back of the car, Paddy knew that the men in the white Ford Escort were now armed. To Paddy, this was merely the benefit of having a distrusting and contrary mind; if it looked like the man was getting food, Paddy would have thought the opposite.

As the Escort pulled forward up to the border guards, Paddy retrieved the pistol hidden beneath his seat for “emergencies” and got out of the car. In the twilight, his visibility was not great but this also worked to his advantage as he was able to amble towards the car without anyone noticing.

Ahead, the first of the two soldiers on duty was escorting the driver round to the back of the car. As the rear hatch was opened, and the guard peered inside, the driver took out his gun and shoved the nozzle into the side of the guard’s neck. Nothing was said – the driver merely put a finger over his lips and, with a smile on his face, intimated that the guard should Ssssh! Meanwhile, the man in the back seat began to get out of the car. The second guard looked on without any idea what was about to happen. Paddy, on the other hand, realised that the driver was now waiting until his colleague had a clear line of fire at the second guard, at which point both soldiers were going to be killed.

Paddy shot the driver through his left ear – the bullet exited at almost the exact opposite spot in his right ear. In the cold evening air, the shot made an extraordinarily loud noise, which seemed to cause everyone to freeze momentarily – until the driver’s dead body hit the ground and all hell broke loose. Paddy pointed his gun at the man getting out from the back of the car and shouted at him to get down onto the road; the second guard pointed his rifle at Paddy and yelled at him to get down. The first guard, freed from having a gun pointed at his temple was unable to collect his thoughts and pointed his gun at everyone in his line of sight.

The third passenger remained motionless, as if unable to comprehend the enormity of the scene outside – or as it turned out, numbed by the realisation that the idiots driving him home had almost certainly cost him his freedom.

Fortunately for Paddy, within a few seconds both guards had worked out who were the “goodies and baddies”. He laid down his gun, once he was satisfied that the second gunman from the car was covered, and put his hands up in the air. Soldiers began to appear from the building that housed the border guards and soon he was able to show his papers and allowed to walk free.

He never did make it to County Kerry. He received an official reprimand over his holiday plans, specifically for not having told anyone where he was going and thus compromising his own safety. He also received a medal for saving the lives of two fellow soldiers and aiding the capture of a wanted IRA suspect – the third man in the car was a notorious bomb maker whose capture brought the IRA bombing campaign to a temporary halt.

All this and Paddy was still only twenty years old.

He grew to love the army life, the way in which everything was done for him, the meals in the mess, the drinking games, the sports, the tours of duty to Belize… by the time of his twenty-fifth birthday, Paddy could not have been happier.

Chapter 3

The Last Rites

Dom Clem turned into Benton Place and walked up the U-shaped drive of the expensive Washington residence. The house was much bigger than neighbouring properties. It had been built in the colonial style, with four gleaming white pillars holding up a portico that towered disproportionately over the front door. In the Corinthian arch of the uppermost part of this structure had been engraved a crest and a motto – neither of which Clem could make out in the bright morning sunshine.

On the driveway directly outside the house was parked a cluster of cars, mainly expensive SUVs and, Clem noticed, two British built Range Rovers. During his days in the army, Clem had driven – well, usually been driven in – the Range Rover and he had never got over the extraordinary way in which the car could cross muddy, wet, hilly fields without so much as a slip or hesitation. It remained a mystery to him why these cars were so popular in Washington – a flat city with tarmac roads and no mud. He did once imagine that it would be possible to drive a Rangie up the steps of the Capitol building or through the waters in front of the Lincoln memorial – but the “why” question usually brought such thoughts to an untested end.

He also noticed that none of the cars had been neatly parked, as if the owners had had other thoughts on their mind when parking, or been in a rush; which brought Clem back down to earth, back to the reason for his visit. These were probably the family members’ cars and the poor parking merely reflected the reason for their visit: the patriarch of the house was dying.

Clem pressed the brass doorbell and a man dressed as a faux-butler opened the door – he had clearly been expecting a priest and did not give the monk’s appearance a second thought. Clem walked into the reception hall.

The surroundings caused Clem to pause. During his time at Downside Abbey, he had frequently been invited to the stately homes of the English gentry – often as a dinner guest whose job was to say grace and allow the hostess to bathe in a glow of religious one-upmanship amongst her assembled friends – but nothing he had seen in Washington or on his trips around the rest of the US compared to the scale and opulence of those buildings, most of which had been built on the back of the huge wealth generated by the British Empire, including of course the country in which he now stood.

Clem’s mind had a tendency to whirl – to jump around between a number of thoughts and ideas, with only the most tenuous link to connect them. During the time he took to step from the front porch into the hall, his mind took in the architecture, compared it to previous experiences, smiled wryly at snobbishness of the English upper class’s behaviour and noted the irony of his current location and the historical gathering of wealth at the expense of the American colony. This was a typical thought process.

“I’m here at the request of Mrs Nixdorf. She’s asked me to talk with her husband.”

Clem wasn’t sure whether he had put this very well, but he could hardly say out loud why he was there. The butler however was clearly fully apprised of the situation, evidenced by the moistening of his eyes as he asked Clem to wait in the hall while he went to fetch Mrs Nixdorf.

Mary Nixdorf had first met Clem at a British embassy reception. She had been there on her own, explaining that her husband was unwell at the time. The conversation had started on the usual subjects, the beautiful weather for the time of year taking up the first few minutes. Clem had noticed during the twelve months since he arrived in Washington that the Americans believed that all Englishmen like to talk about the weather – a cliché that was particularly inappropriate for Clem who liked all climates and believed the weather was something to experience, not to discuss.

Fortunately, they had moved on to more spiritual matters and Clem had immediately taken to Mary when she began to express her doubts about the concept of the virgin birth.

Clem’s Catholic beliefs had to be underpinned by that belief, which was one of the stand-out tenets of his faith, but Clem’s contrary and argumentative nature led him to wonder whether the idea was a spiritual one rather than an absolute. Not that this “wondering” could be expressed to anyone – it was one of his internal debates, in which he both proposed and opposed the motion, all in his head.

This kept them chatting for several minutes, until the ambassador’s wife intervened and took Clem off to meet an ex-pat from Stockport called Nick something. The most interesting thing about this man was that his red hair was receding from the neck upwards rather than the more normal crown downwards. Clem found this fascinating, which was more than could be said for Nick, who spent the rest of the evening talking about money and football: one of the most boring combinations on Earth. Clem later caught Mary’s eye – she saw who he was talking to and pretended to yawn. He decided he liked and respected this eighty-year-old woman, who in turn liked being in his company and would have discussed any subject that kept him interested, smiling and attentive. Since their first meeting, Clem had been round to the house on a couple of occasions and had enjoyed tea and intelligent conversation with Mrs Nixdorf. He found himself filled with admiration for her, for her social conscience and religious fervour. In many ways, it was a meeting of like minds.

Today however, the woman who walked down the main staircase to greet Clem was unrecognisable as the flirtatious old lady of those earlier meetings. Her make up, normally immaculate, was poorly applied and smudged around her eyes. She looked tired, emotional and in a great deal of pain.

She kissed Clem’s hand – another uniquely American habit that he normally found intensely amusing. Not today though.

“Dom Clem – thank you so much for coming at short notice. I am afraid Art’s got steadily weaker over the last twenty-four hours and the doctor, who’s here now, thinks it’s a matter of hours or even minutes until…”

Clem wrapped his arms around her and held her as the tears turned to sobs and her strength evaporated. He had never realised quite how tiny she was. He caught sight of the two of them in the hall mirror and noticed that Mary had nearly disappeared into the folds of his cassock. His heart went out to this woman.

Once she had regained her composure, she explained.

“Art’s never been particularly religious, although he was brought up a Catholic and used to join me and the family for Mass on the rare occasions when he wasn’t working on a Sunday… and yet, just before I phoned you, he took my hand and asked me to fetch a priest so he could give his last confession. I was going to ring Father McCarthy from our local church, but in the time I’ve got to know you, I’ve come to appreciate your calmness and spirituality and… well, I just thought you were the right person to call.”

Mary led Clem up the stairs – past the family portraits, one of which was of a young and strong-looking Arthur Nixdorf – and they turned into the main corridor of the first floor. At the end of the passage was a large feature window through which the sun streamed, giving the appearance of leading the corridor out of the building and up into the sky. Clem realised that he was having what he called a “Hollywood moment”, something that was happening more and more since he came to the US. He put these thoughts away as Mary turned the handle of a large door. Together they walked inside.

Art was propped up on several pillows in the middle of a huge four-poster bed. Around him were the three children, none of whom Clem had met before. A doctor was listening to Art’s breathing and when he saw Mary, he got up and collected his medical bag. He walked towards the door, stopping to kiss her on the cheek and, with one slow shake of the head, gave his final prognosis.

Mary stepped to the bed and kissed Art on the forehead. She introduced Clem

“Darling, this is Dom Clem Appleberry, a wonderful man who’s here to talk with you and hear your confession – if you still want that.”

Clem noticed that she did not refer to his “last confession”.

Art seemed to re-focus, firstly on the scene around him and then directly into the eyes of the tall, robed Monk who now stood by the bed. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he turned to Mary and asked,

“Mary, take the children out and leave me alone with the priest.”

Mary hesitated for a second, before getting up and offering her outstretched hand to her daughter, a beautiful girl in her twenties. Slowly the two women walked towards the door, followed eventually by the two boys.

Clem took out a purple stole from his pocket together with a worn Bible presented to him by the abbot before he left for the US. He kissed the stole and placed it around his neck. Then, having taken Art’s hand and placed it on top of the Bible, he started the confession with an introduction he had used a few times previously.

“Art, my name’s Clem. I took the name Clement in honour of St Clement who was martyred by the Romans. They tied an anchor to his feet and threw him into the sea. It’s said that once a year, this sea receded by over two miles leaving a divinely built shrine standing where his body had been sunk. St Clement shows us that death is not the end, either in heaven or on earth. Where great men have existed, a shrine or legacy or accomplishment remains on earth and God welcomes them into his kingdom, into heaven in reward for their great achievements. I have come to hear your last confession. Use this to cleanse your spirit of any sins you’ve committed, genuinely repent of those sins, and you’ll surely be forgiven and welcomed into the kingdom of God.”

“No, I won’t,” said Art, a response that Clem admitted to himself was unexpected.

In fact, Clem was completely flummoxed by it. He regained his composure. Clearly this was not going to be a routine confession. It had happened before. He had once attended a “last confession” in which an old man confessed, with his wife sat in the background, that he had fathered at least two children outside of his marriage and had been having an affair with his PA for more than ten years. Clem still smiled at the recollection of his granting forgiveness and setting the penance while in the background the wife was telling the old man that he would “rot in hell”.

Art took a deep wheezy breath and began.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has bee…”

He hesitated, struggling to remember when he had last confessed. Clem tried to help.

“Art, it doesn’t matter when you last confessed. All that matters is now. Carry on.”

“Father, I’m responsible for the murder of nine honest hard-working innocent young American men. I’ve borne this burden in desperate secrecy for over twenty years. Not a day’s passed when I didn’t think about their fate, when I didn’t want to turn back the clock and do things differently.”

Art began to cry – the tears formed at the corner of his eyes and Clem noticed that the pupils and irises were now grey, unlike the brilliant black and bright blue of the man in the portrait on the stairs.

“Father, I want to ask God for forgiveness… I understand this won’t be enough to get me to Heaven. I want him to know that I was acting in the best interests of my family and my business. I want him to know that I didn’t realise that I was condemning these men to their death when I acted as I did. I should have realised but I didn’t. Please forgive me.”

Art went silent. Clem tried desperately to focus. The confession had completely thrown him. Arthur Nixdorf was a pillar of Washington society, a generous supporter of charities throughout the state, the father of three children, each of whom was by all accounts a successful member of the local community. This was the husband of Mary Nixdorf, a truly beloved doyenne of Washington society, about whom he had never heard a bad word.

None of what he had just heard made sense. Clem began to feel a little nauseous as the adrenalin surged round his body, as his stomach muscles tightened. He realised that he had no idea what to say, or what to do. Should he grant forgiveness? Are mass-murderers forgiven before the execution? Was there a standard penance for such an offence?

Momentarily, Clem was lost.

He found serenity and support by focusing back on Downside and the abbey. This was, he realised, his comfort zone and inspiration. He wondered what the abbot would do. Abbot Hilary Crouzet had, at an earlier stage of his life, been the visiting priest to one of Britain’s maximum security jails, housing the worst criminal offenders in the country. Confessions of murder were the norm for Dom Hilary. He once explained to Clem that the severity of the sin only had to be matched by the sincerity of the remorse for God’s forgiveness to be earned.

“There is nothing man can do that is so bad that it cannot, with contrition, be granted forgiveness by the Lord. Remember, Jesus forgave those who betrayed him and who crucified him.”

Clem was dragged back into reality and away from his thoughts by the sight and sounds of Art, who was clearly dying in front of him.

“Art, you’ll shortly be able to seek forgiveness from God himself. I feel that you have already served your penance here on Earth, through the remorse you’ve felt for whatever actions you once took. I hereby grant you absolution, in the name of the Father and of...”

Art’s bony hand left the bible and grabbed Clem’s arm. For a dying man, Art had a very strong grip – like a blacksmith’s in fact. Clem was taken aback.

“What about the treason, Father? What about my betrayal of this country that I love so much? How will my family feel if the truth’s ever revealed? What sort of shrine have I left on Earth, Father? What sort of shrine?”

He paused. Clem could see the fire in the eyes subside, could feel the strength in the grip fade away. Art took in a deep, deep breath and continued.

“I can’t believe I killed…”

Art began to sag, the words got quieter and more slurred.

“My day is…”

And with those final words, Art Nixdorf passed away.

Chapter 4

The return of the Jedi

Dom Clement Appleberry performed the last rites for Art Nixdorf, who claimed to have killed nine people. It was a struggle to concentrate on the task; to stop his mind racing back to the confession and the man’s extraordinary claims. On this occasion, a sign of the cross and one quick prayer would have to do.

Then, for about ten minutes, he remained motionless by the bedside. Over and over again he replayed Arthur Nixdorf’s last words in his head, trying to make sense of what he had heard. Was the treason linked to the nine deaths? Did Art say he had murdered nine people, or that he was just responsible for their deaths? Did he say this all happened twenty years ago and what was the relevance of that final sentence; indeed what did he actually say?

Clem felt that something cataclysmic had just happened, that this was a life changing moment just like that spring day on the Northern Irish border post. But back then, Clem had felt in command; he had decided to shoot a man dead for good reasons and had done so – a black-and-white situation and outcome. This, however, was beyond his control. He had not asked to be drawn into a world of treason and murder. What had he just learned?

His focus was brought back into the semi-dark room of the Washington mansion by a light tapping on the door. The outside world wanted to come back in and Dom Clem knew he had to compose himself and focus on the issue at hand – Arthur’s death.

Clem opened the door to find Mary’s anxious face peering in at him. Does she know about this? he wondered. Was this why he had been summoned instead of the normal parish priest? Clem cast his eyes downward, contemplating this new layer of confusion.