by Craig Thomas
"But they'll have half their U-boats to the north, half to the south. We could still hang on, with the odds rearranged like that—"
Ashe seemed to be telling himself, convincing an invisible audience. Gilliatt remembered he was from a moneyed family, and there was a cousin high up in the Admiralty. What he was hearing was a private conversation rather than a briefing or a digest of sailing orders. Ashe had been put in the picture, and wanted to retreat from it, or share it so that it was not so immense a burden. He hadn't wanted to join the club, be in the know — if the knowledge was close to despair.
Gilliatt recognized his own reluctance to digest what he heard; even his own attitude to desk-work, to Intelligence. Perhaps he had wanted to be at sea, in the lower echelons where no one carried responsibility for more than his own ship, his own men.
The air seemed hot, constricting, in the small cabin..
"Close to the three-mile limit, and they'd be in sight of land all the way, and on the unexpected wing of the minefield, not down near Cornwall — any ships could make a course alteration at the last minute, outpace the U-boats—" Ashe was speaking more softly now, calmer. Making sense of his orders, limiting their implications.
"A thousand-yard channel, dan-buoyed, all the way from Carnsore to Old Head?" Gilliatt asked.
Ashe nodded. Looked up, his eyes clearing, his face less firmly, more habitually set; familiar lines, familiar strength.
"That's it, Peter. Another sweeping operation."
"What about that McBride chap?"
Ashe shook his head. "We'll transfer him to the spare sweeper, they can drop him off inshore of the minefield. He has nothing to do with us."
"Lucky for him."
"My cousin told me how vital all this was for the war effort — et cetera," Ashe said, standing up for the first time, his big knuckles resting on the chart — directly on Kinsale and County Cork. "I could hardly tell him I didn't want to know we had our backs absolutely to the wall, could I? That I didn't want to know we might be going down the bloody sink at any moment!" Ashe was growling now, but he patted Gilliatt on the shoulder. "Sorry to let you in on it, Peter. I'm afraid I couldn't carry it around inside me any longer—" His eyes became inward-looking, filmed. "They're all drifting round the Admiralty with grey faces, Peter."
"It's all right, sir, thank you for telling me."
"Polite — but you don't mean it."
"No, sir, perhaps not. We're hanging by the merest thread, it looks like. Not a pleasant thought—"
Ashe seemed guilty at having burdened Gilliatt, yet there was also relief, the shoulders were straighter.
"God," he said, as if in consolation, "we may already be beaten, Peter — do you think it could be true?"
"I hope it's not, sir. I hope to God it's not true."
* * *
Both men seemed to have agreed, unspokenly, that to remain in the commodore's offices in the Admiralty building in Whitehall was too covert, too removed from the battered London around them which now, indirectly but more urgently than ever, concerned them.
Walsingham had gained an interview with the Director of Minesweeping as soon as he returned to London from the house outside Southampton. The smudge of the city had been visible to him, hanging like a pall against a pale winter sky without other cloud, for miles before he had reached the Surrey suburbs. Then it had taken him hours to make his way through Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Battersea, across the bridge and through Chelsea. Streets wet with fire-fightrng, coated like a new surface with broken glass, heaps of smouldering — or rescued — furniture piled on the pavements, little groups of stunned people, the occasional ambulance, and other small groups who knew what they had lost already and had abandoned hope, holes in the lines of terraced houses in so many streets — heaps of rubble over which firemen and ambulance men clambered for the sake of relatives who watched them dumbly.
They were walking now in Hungerford Lane, near Charing Cross Station, the gaunt skeleton of the railway bridge black against the sky, sombre. The station roof, too, appeared charred by recent fires rather than sooted by time and the steam engine.
"Commodore — would it be a reasonable supposition, then?" Walsingham asked at last, as if he had wearied of visual impressions, wanted now a renewed sense of purpose. He felt himself coming out of mild shock.
The Director of Minesweeping, to whom the damage of the previous night, and the prior weeks, had been a narrow burning perception of the enemy's vileness, looked at his young, small companion. Walsingham seemed troubled by doubts, but the commodore could not decide if that was a deferential pretence or merely the visible reminders of the air raid.
"I would say—" Someone passed them pushing a handcart into which were piled office chairs. The spiky, tumbled legs seemed to threaten, or defy. "Yes — yes, Commander, it would be a very reasonable supposition."
They turned down towards the Victoria Embankment, passing under the railway bridge. A train rattled over them, and out across the Thames. The noise silenced them, but the shadows under the bridge were cold, and the sound hammered down at them so that both men flinched as if deep, traumatic memories had surfaced. When the train had gone, both men smiled.
"Yes," the commodore continued. "The kind of stanchions and other new fittings you describe would certainly most likely be minesweeping equipment. It's probable that they would operate as a team of six — linked in twos, and rigged out to employ an A-sweep in a "C" formation." Walsingham appeared confused, irritated at his own shallow knowledge. The U-boats would be linked in twos, the first two in line, then the second two, then the third pair, in a "C" formation. It would give them as near as possible a one hundred per cent clearance of the channel they were sweeping." Walsingham nodded. "I can't think why they'd be based at Guernsey. Naturally, we drop mines outside their harbours, and the submarine bases in Brittany and Normandy, but Guernsey isn't especially well-placed as a base for sweeping subs, and we don't make a fuss around the Channel Islands. What is going on?"
Walsingham was not prepared to lecture the DMS on security.
"I'd rather not say at present, sir," he murmured deferentially. "It's only a theory—"
"Those bloody U-boats aren't a theory, young man. I hope you're not going to play silly buggers with this information, keep it to yourself or something equally stupid?"
Walsingham knew it was bluff. He would not tell the commodore, because he had to conserve the element of shock and surprise for his own masters in Whitehall.
"Sorry, sir, but I will be seeing my own superiors in QIC later today — and they will decide what happens next."
"Politely telling me to mind my own business," the DMS snorted, looking studiously ahead at the approaching bulk of Waterloo Bridge. He laughed, an abrupt, loud noise like indigestion. "Very well, but let me tell you this—"
He turned to Walsingham, stood with his hands on his hips like some more piratical ancestor.
"The Kriegsmarine doesn't have U-boats to spare, Commander. If there are as many as you suggest engaged in minesweeping duties, then they are sweeping to some very exact, and vitally important, purpose."
"Exactly what I was afraid of," was all Walsingham would say in reply.
October 198-
McBride had wanted to stop for a while in Salisbury — the white cathedral spire across the fields summoned him from photographs and prints — but he felt energized by a restlessness of mind that prompted him to find the A338 on the other side of the city, and head towards the M4 and London. The spire flicked in and out of the driving-mirror for a time, so that he hardly attended to the news item on the car radio.
"… a police spokesman said that two men were being held in custody at Braintree police station, where it was expected that charges under the Prevention of Terrorism Act would be brought against them later today. Our reporter believes that the two men are among those wanted in connection with the London restaurant bombing…"
He switched channels as the news items of a country he hardl
y knew continued. Vivaldi sprang from the two speakers behind him, and he tapped at the wheel in a comfortable state of half-attention while he considered what Mrs Forbes — Gilliatt's daughter — had told him.
His own father had been in Ireland, and with Gilliatt, late in 1940, and in connection with a German invasion of Ireland. Emerald Necklace — his father had been part of it.
He had encountered few moments in his even, academic life which possessed such naked shock. Few things had impinged upon him so directly, the halting, recollected sentences of the woman in the chair opposite him beating on him rather than seeping into his consciousness. He was in the presence of events— an alternative present— rather than hearing of some dim time beyond his own experience. A curious sense of predestination assailed him, almost as misty and illogical and assertive as a religious experience. He could not cope with the information, almost ignored the name and whereabouts of the man his father had operated under — Drummond, he'd fixed it like a photographic image, the chemicals of repetition coming to his assistance — in his desire to get away from the house in Sturminster Newton and come to terms with what he had heard.
"What happened to your father I have no idea— my father, would not say, though perhaps he didn't know. But they were together in Ireland, working for Drummond, who was some kind of secret agent—"
She had smiled with apology. She believed her father, naturally, but had no sense of what he might have been doing. Certainly not figuring in some drama she might have read in a fiction.
His own reaction — now in the warm car, the Vivaldi moving crisply through its slow movement — was of a similar unreality. He was ignorant of his father's war record, but the secrecy which may have surrounded it too easily toppled into melodrama. Except that his father was connected with Smaragdenhalskette. His father was a proof of its existence.
It was growing dark by the time he reached the motorway and turned onto it. He began to make good time, looking ahead to a flight to Ireland, to meet Drummond — if he still lived south-west of Cork. It would be a simple matter to trace him, and perhaps as simple to interview him. An old man now, he would open his memory like a box of keepsakes. Somewhere under the years was his father.
McBride had no direct interest in his father — he had, during the drive, sublimated him in the publicity that would attend his new book, the son-of-the-father angle which was pure, dramatic accident. He was not on a quest for his father. Michael McBride, about whom he possessed a certain curiosity, was only one light among the decorations giving off a Christmas-tree gleam as he approached the warm room in which Emerald Necklace waited like a reward.
November 1940
The minesweeper lowered him into the water, in the ship's motorboat, half a mile offshore — though officially the ship should not have entered the three-mile limit of neutral Ireland's territorial waters — and in the company of the young sub-lieutenant and a stoker in charge of the boat's noisy engine he chugged towards the unlit shore where Drummond would be waiting to pick him up. There was no element of danger, and there would be no protest from the Dublin government. Naval vessels had collected fruit, eggs, even alcohol from the coast of southern Ireland — he was just another item of barter.
He was conscious of the windless night, the almost calm sea, the fresh chill and the smell of land. He was aware of Guernsey and his frantic effort to escape, but now only as an occasion for smiling.
They slipped into low Carrigada Bay, the lights of two cottages a sighting and a welcome; the faintest glow of the village of Reagrove beyond. The lack of black-out so different from England, and — most recently — the dark, wet docks of Milford Haven as the minesweeping flotilla had forlornly set sail. Always that sense of emptiness behind the outlines of cranes, an empty country or city; and always the sense of lights, of scattered quiet lives being lived when he arrived home.
The stoker cut the engine to idling, and the boat immediately began to wallow. McBride slipped over the side, and the chill of the water struck through his sea-boots, the slopping incoming tide reaching almost to his knees.
"Good luck, sir," the young sub-lieutenant called, and McBride waved one hand as he waded through the shallows to the beach and the motorboat's engine picked up again as it turned back to the minesweeper.
The incoming tide would remove his footprints — though most of the locals would have heard the engine of the boat and guessed at its passenger — and he lengthened his stride.
He grinned in the darkness as he moved onto the soft sand above the high-tide mark, and saw Drummond waiting, calmly smoking a cigarette. He was leaning on the side of the shed where a fisherman kept his nets, his tall, lean frame relaxed, unconcerned.
"Michael?" he asked quietly.
"No," McBride replied in German. "Admiral Donitz — I'm here to look around." Drummond laughed softly in the darkness, then shook hands with McBride.
"Welcome back."
When McBride had lit the offered cigarette, Drummond headed the Morris back up the track towards the coast road. McBride settled against the leather seat, contentedly drawing in and exhaling the smoke.
"You were of use to our common masters, I take it?" Drummond asked as he turned onto the road. Lights dotted the fields around them, small as hand-held lamps, each one an uncurtained window or an open door. McBride noted them like a Victorian parent counting heads and reassuring himself his family was entirely present. Not one of those lights would not be there the following night, or the night after that—
Unless Walsingham was right. As he thought that, he was aware, also, of Drummond's half-amused question, even of the nettled irritation far back in the tones which reminded him of Drummond's dislike of loaning one of his agents to London.
"I suppose so. I just went, looked, reported, and was told to keep quiet about it. I suppose it was of some use to someone." Walsingham had told him that Drummond might be informed at a later date. For the present, he was to be told nothing. He did not even know where McBride had been.
"It's secret, of course?" Drummond asked lightly as he pulled up at the crossroads in the village of Nohaval. As expected, there were no other cars, in any direction. McBride wound down the window, and felt the cold air rush into the car.
"Apparently, Robert."
"I've got another job for you, anyway. Your real work," Drummond said as the car pulled away on the Kinsale road.
"Tomorrow, I hope—"
"Tomorrow will do. Reports of a German agent landing two nights ago by boat from a submarine— reliable reports, I hasten to add—" Drummond chuckled. McBride studied his profile. A stereotyped British naval officer, that head above the white roll-neck sweater and the dark jacket that could have been mistaken for a uniform.
"No trace since?"
"Nothing."
"Where was this?"
"Rosscarbery Bay — the other side of Galley Head. A couple of miles from your place."
"Maureen probably gave him dinner."
Drummond laughed. "You'll have a look around, and let me know?" McBride nodded. "Good. That's the third in two weeks. I wonder what's going on?"
"They could be deserting from their submarines," McBride offered before he settled back into the seat again, lighting another cigarette from Drummond's packet on the dashboard.
The tiny hamlet of Leap lay almost in darkness astride the main Clonakilty-Skibbereen road as Drummond's car pulled up outside McBride's cottage. There was light coming through flower-patterned curtains in the kitchen. Drummond's own house was a spacious, prosperous-looking white farmhouse near Kilbrittain, twenty-five miles back the way they had come, inland of the Old Head of Kinsale. Drummond had officially retired from the Royal Navy in 1934, in company with a great many officers who, at that time, believed the Royal Navy would never rearm and thus rob them of careers, and moved to Ireland, selling a small family estate in order to buy a farm in County Cork. Here, he had continued to work for Admiralty Intelligence, setting up a network of coast-watchers and intelli
gence gatherers along the south coast of that weak defensive flank of Britain, neutral Eire. McBride had been one of his first, and most successful, recruits.
McBride got out of the car, slammed the door for the pleasure of making a noise that would betray his presence, and walked round to Drummond's window.
"I'll get on with that in the morning," he said, and Drummond nodded.
"Good. Let me have a report in a couple of days. And take care of your health, Michael."
"I will. Thanks for the lift."
"One day you must tell me all about your trip," Drummond said lightly, then switched on the engine, and turned the car round towards Clonakilty again. He tooted noisily as he drove off, a white hand waving from the still-open Window. McBride threw away the rest of his cigarette, and approached the door of the cottage.
Maureen would never come out to greet him if Drummond were there — McBride could never decide whether it was because she was Irish rather than Anglo-Irish like himself or whether it was because she simply resented the man who took him away, placed him in danger. But then, he reminded himself, Maureen didn't like what he did for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was her father's lifelong acquaintance with the IRA. He smiled as he pushed open the door, latched it again behind him — but the smile was saddened, as if he were suddenly burdened with an unpleasant freight of unwished-for complications amid his homecoming.
Maureen emerged from the kitchen into the lamp-lit gloom and warmth of the living-room, her arms white with flour, apron on. She wore her domesticity like an irritant or a disguise; a posture of which he was well aware. She seemed to desire to be nothing much to come home to, have no special place in his mind or affections. The little woman, he told himself as he stood watching her and she did not move from the kitchen door. Since the war, since he had begun working for Drummond and the British — not so much a reproof or disapproval; rather a slight distancing, more in case he got killed than because she objected. She was more comfortable inside an unpretentious outer covering — nothing overwhelming would happen to a woman like her.
