Chicago Assault by Randy Wayne White Read Free Book Online Page A

sarcasm.
    â€œHah! Do you want me to explain things to you or not?”
    â€œI’m listening.”
    O’Neil nodded. “Chicago and Boston have the largest Irish population outside Ireland itself—you already know that. Most of the Irish in both cities arrived from the home country during or just after the potato famine of the 1840s. An entire nation of subsistence farmers depended on those potatoes to keep their families alive. But during those years, 1845 to 1849, the potatoes caught some cursed blight and rotted before the very eyes of our great grandfathers. Sure, the other crops in the fields were fine. Good grain, fine vegetables. But the English had already stolen our lands, and they demanded the good crops as rent, knowing full well they were sentencing their tenants to death by starvation.
    â€œYet they still demanded their crops. Starving Irishmen harvested crops grown through their own sweat and saw the food hauled away by English landlords while their own wives and children ate grass. More than a million men, women, and children starved to death during those horrible four years. And the English did nothing. It was genocide; pure and simple, Hawk. They wanted the tenants off the land—land the tenant families had owned and farmed for a thousand years. The knowledge that they stole the land from beneath the corpses of Irish children meant nothing to them, for we have always been less than animals in the eyes of the English.”
    O’Neil’s voice grew husky with emotion as he spoke, and his knuckles were white beneath the heavy bandage on his right hand. “A million simple farmfolk starved, and a million more immigrated to America. The world has forgotten the thievery of the English, and the suffering they caused, but some of those who came to America still remember. They remember that it was the English who banned our religion and made the use of our Gaelic language a crime punishable by death. They remember that the English still rule our God-given land, though they have neither the moral or legal right. Thank God they remember, Hawk, for the English have committed a sin against humanity that must never be forgotten.”
    He looked suddenly at James Hawker. “These are the ones who come to me. They give me money for the Irish Republican Army, and I see that the weaponry the money buys gets to Ireland. And if an Irish-American lad decides he wants to join the fight, I put him in touch with the proper people. And if an IRA soldier must flee Ireland, I arrange for safe passage to this country. You see, Hawk, in the minds of too many, our war over there is an insane fight between Catholics and Protestants. They don’t understand the depth of the cause or the righteousness of it. But I swear before God that the war will never end until we have won our country back and freed our lands of bloody English hands.”
    As O’Neil spoke, Hawker felt the old hatreds move through him, the hatreds he’d thought were long buried. “So you need to call the Ennisfree because you’re hiding someone there?” he asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDoes the IRA have something to do with Beckerman’s murder?”
    O’Neil sighed. “Indirectly, I’m afraid. As I said, I had planned to call you, for I need help, Hawk.”
    â€œDo you want to tell me about it now?”
    O’Neil was quiet for a moment. “After I’ve made my telephone call,” he said finally. “And once I have a glass of good whiskey in my hand.”
    Jimmy O’Neil found a phone booth on Archer Avenue, then turned southeast on Farrell. The Ennisfree had a red brick facade with canvas awnings and brass door fixtures.
    At the door, he knocked three times, slowly. Inside, a single light came on. There was a tumbling of bolts and locks, and the door swung open.
    Hawker followed O’Neil inside.
    The figure that confronted them in the bar stood in the shadows.