Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  "You sound like my agent—" He grinned. "Sorry. Your interest is appreciated." He sighed, leaned back in his seat and stared at the clouds moving above him. "Yes — yes, your interest is appreciated. And maybe my interest ought to get off its butt and do some sniffing around!"

  Claire Drummond seemed relieved, pleased. "Perhaps it should. For your sake."

  "I guess my father — distracted me?" He nodded, agreeing his supposition. "Mm. Gilliatt and the old man may have been involved, but they're both as dead as that cottage down there—" He nodded in the direction of Leap. "I never knew him, and maybe I have to get used to never knowing him." He grinned disarmingly. "I have a big book to write. London calls—" He let a theatrical regret enter his features. Claire Drummond smiled.

  "I'll come with you," she announced.

  November 1940

  McBride and Drummond had explored the coastline between the western shore of Glandore Harbour down to Toe Head. The search had taken most of the day, especially because they had to wind north then south again around the inlet of Castle Haven. They were looking for some sign of the landing of a German agent, to give them a more precise area of search when they moved inland. Drummond had received a report of a landing the previous night which was no more than a sighting of lights on a stretch of beach between Horse Island and Scullane Point — and lights four miles further up the coast. Either or both of them could have been a little smuggling, even an IRA attempt to land guns and explosives, but Drummond could not afford to ignore any such report.

  Drummond watched McBride from behind the wheel of his car as the Irishman walked along the beach below him towards Scullane Point. The tide was out and he would be able to round the headland to Toe Head Bay without leaving the beach. When he had done so, they would call it a day, and go back to the unrewarding task of pub-watching and shop-to-shop enquiries for strangers, for increased orders of food and supplies.

  Drummond jogged in his seat with the slow, careful movement of the car along the narrow cliff-top track, his patience almost as exhausted as his physique. He was cold, and uncomfortable, and frustrated. He could scent, with certainty, a German preparation for something hitherto outside his range of experience and expertise. Yet still McBride had found nothing.

  McBride was waving, yelling — was McBride waving? He tugged on the handbrake, leaned out of the window. They were past the few straggling cottages on the cliffs, almost at the point. Yes, McBride was waving—

  Drummond got out of the car, cupped his hands to his mouth, and yelled down at McBride. The wind from the sea seemed to throw his words about like gulls, but McBride was nodding furiously, beckoning him down. He'd found something.

  Drummond began running back along the cliff until he reached the nearest path down to the beach. He scrambled down it, his shoes scuffing, almost slipping on the loose gravel and rock. The cliffs were low, but he was out of breath and almost dizzy by the time he reached the soft sand. McBride was waiting for him right under the cliffs overhang, sitting on a large rock smoking a cigarette. He seemed, after his frantic semaphore, relaxed and unconcerned. Drummond approached him as if he suspected a joke, and he its object.

  "Well?"

  McBride gestured over his shoulder. "Behind me there, weighted down in a rock-pool. One very obviously German raft." McBride was studying Drummond as if he expected an immediate explanation. Drummond scrambled over the rocks. Just as McBride had described it, a grey inflatable raft — now deflated — lay at the bottom of the shallow pool, weighted down almost carelessly with a few heavy rocks so that it would not drift back out to sea with the next high tide. It seemed undamaged. Drummond scrambled back to McBride, and sat down, lighting his own Player's cigarette.

  "Well?" he said again.

  "You know, I'm thinking that we were meant to find that thing there."

  "What?"

  "It's never been so easy before. As if they wanted to tip us off they're here. Now, why would they want to do that? If we hadn't found it, someone who would have told us about it or might have done — we'd have come here anyway." McBride looked about him almost with a sense of threat. He continued in a murmur, clarifying something for himself. "There's a man in Castletownshend would help them, and there are more than a few in Skibbereen. He might have been met here — now, why didn't they take the raft if they met him?"

  "It's really worrying you, isn't it?" Drummond's features were sharpened by cold rather than concentration.

  "It is. They're landing more agents than before, and taking less care — at least on this occasion. Downright sloppy, if you ask me."

  The sharp plop of something in the rock-pool behind them was clearly audible before the flat crack of the Lee Enfield rifle came to them, muffled by the wind. The second shot splintered rock near McBride, and he felt the patter of tiny pieces on the back of his left hand before he was able to absorb the sensory information, understand it, and begin to move.

  "Get down!" he yelled at Drummond, who was far slower to react.

  McBride began running, stepping from rock to rock with unbalanced speed, changing direction by instinct as he moved closer to the cliff-face, under its overhang. Two more shots, the bullets skipping like angry insects away from his feet.

  Then, ahead of him, and with a clear view of his dodging, almost hysterical passage across the rocks, a second rifleman opened up at him from Scullane Point. There was no shelter beneath the cliff-face from the second man, whose vantage looked down the length of the beach towards Horse Island.

  The first two bullets plucked through the tail of McBride's donkey-jacket as it flew in the wind.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Weight of Evidence

  November 1940

  McBride felt the tug of the bullets as they passed through the tail of his jacket as a momentary hand restraining him. Then he pitched, off-balance, across the rocks, scraping his shins and hands, but already adopting the momentum-of the fall and rolling with it, sliding down the face of a boulder, his cheek dragging painfully against its surface. He came to rest half-sitting in the shallow water of a rock-pool. He lay back as another shot splintered the grey rock, whined away towards the cliff-face.

  He was out of sight — trapped, but temporarily safe.

  "Drummond?" he called, and found his voice ragged and dry. "Drummond, are you all right!" A gap of time that the wind filled and the cry of a gull; but there was no shooting.

  "Yes, where are you?"

  "In the rocks. Are you hit?"

  "No, thank God, are you?"

  "No."

  Then there was nothing more to say. McBride broke the contact that seemed as fragile as a long-distance telephone call. Drummond was, presumably, out of sight. McBride lifted his head, and began studying the cliff-face that leaned out over him, hiding him from either of the snipers who might walk along the cliff-top to that point. But as long as the second man remained on Scullane Point, McBride could not move.

  A bullet screamed off the rock beside his head, and the flat crack of the rifle pursued it.

  One of them would come down onto the beach — by the path Drummond had used — while the second man kept them pinned down. It was a simple task, like killing seals or seabirds. McBride felt infuriated at the helplessness of his situation, knowing even as he raged inwardly that he was wasting adrenalin, wasting rationality. But there seemed nothing he could do.

  He raised his head again, in a different position further along the narrow pool. The water was chilly, seeping into him already, suggesting lethargy, insinuating inactivity. He was a hundred yards from the cliffs of Scullane Point, from their shelter. A hundred yards across outcrops of rock, fallen boulders, and loose sand. He could die a dozen times before he reached the shelter of the overhang. Again, his hands bunched into fists, and he hugged himself with the fury of impotence.

  He had no other choice. Drummond receded in his awareness, as if he had begun clearing out the lumber of his life in preparation for dying. The man might already be coming
down the cliff-path, might kill Drummond while he was still running for the cliff-face, but it could not be helped. He slipped out of his jacket, wondered for a moment about his boots but left them on, then began breathing deeply, easily. He lifted his head again, ducked back as the bullet whined across the rocks, waited a moment before turning onto his hands and knees — then thrust himself up and out of the shelter of the rock-pool.

  The wind seemed to cut through his wet trousers, the noise of the sea was more ominous, omnipresent, a gull screamed as if to warn the sniper, he felt buffeted and unbalanced. He drove on, senses flooding with information, every inch of his skin alive with nerves that anticipated the impact, the dulling blow of the first bullet.

  He jumped onto sand, a shot plucking up shells and sand near his boot, then began weaving in a broken run towards the point. A speeded-up drunk. He moved by instinct, the awareness of his body's paper-like fragility growing with each moment.

  His mind chanted in chorus with each thudding footstep, come on, come on, come on — it chimed with the racing of his blood, the hideously loud heartbeat, even with the slowed-down breaths like an undertow. Each step was taking him closer, making the angle of the rifle more acute, more depressed. The sniper had fired only twice since he showed himself. He was waiting, lining up, had him now in the notch of the sight, his progress so much slower from that angle and height, his body bulky and unmissable—

  He wanted to shout out, wave his arms, felt his nerve going finally as his sense of his own fragility all but overcame him. He knew his legs were going, slowing down, his breath catching up in pace. And the rifleman was waiting for that, waiting for the exposed fly to lose its nerve, crack. Anything else would be a waste of bullets. He was very close to screaming.

  He stumbled into the overhang, felt the cliff at his fingertips, heard the rattle of rifle fire as the man on the cliff-top squeezed off four in rapid succession to express his frustration, the overconfidence outrun and baffled. McBride scuttled forward until he was sitting hunched into the rock, his back pressed against it, shaking, his arms hugging his knees, his breath roaring to drown every other sound. He could not believe that he had made it, even as he accepted that he had survived the gamble that the rifleman would wait just a moment too long for the optimum shot at a target moving towards him. McBride knew — an instructor somewhere had said it — that the first, second, even third man you killed could not be running towards you, could not be so easy a target, growing bigger in the sight-notch. It unnerved, but more than that it rendered complacent, expanded time until it ran out before you noticed.

  McBride had never believed the instructor — not completely— until that moment. Now, he wanted to laugh, and vomit while he laughed. He kept his teeth pressed together.

  The first man who had opened up on them was nowhere to be seen. Drummond's arm waved from behind some boulders, seemingly a huge distance away, then it went back out of sight. Drummond would have to take his chance.

  Recovery time, recovery time—

  He forced himself to his feet, and immediately felt light-headed and weak, his legs leaden and useless. He jogged a couple of yards, tried to feel better but didn't, then forced himself into an awkward, shambling run around the point, keeping drunkenly close to the cliff-face for shelter and support, his feet skittering and scrabbling in the loose shale.

  He rounded the point, into a notch of rock with a pebbly beach which opened out further on into the cliffs of Toe Head. If he were simply running away now, he could keep on all the way round to Toe Head Bay, away from the two snipers. He moved along the bottom of the low cliff slowly now, eyes always flitting between the rock above him and the places where he carefully put his feet.

  A split in the rocks, like a jagged knife-cut. His hand almost caressed it. He slid into it, back braced, boots wedged against the opposite side of the slit. Then he began moving up, using his back, his shoulders, his feet, his grasping hands — scuttling like a beetle or other insect as quickly as he could. The wind seemed to want to dislodge him. He did not look down. It was an easy climb, only difficult because he was climbing towards a rifle, he was already nervously exhausted, and because he was doing it in a hurry. His hands reached over two sharp lips of rock, and he heaved at the rest of his reluctant body — balanced — then raised himself by his arms until his head was just above the cliff-edge, his eyes level with the thin grass, with an old cigarette-end which lay right at the edge of the cliff.

  The sniper was standing up, yelling to his companion a couple of hundred yards away — no, more than that, he corrected himself. Three, three-fifty even. He seemed to have temporarily lost interest in McBride, perhaps was even at a loss. His accent was Irish, and at the same time as that realization chilled McBride he understood that the local IRA were in the business of executions on German orders, and why the boy — he was little more than that from the back — was now puzzled. He was taking orders, and more orders were now required. Who was going down to the beach? When?

  The boy had assumed that McBride — unarmed, insect-like McBride running brokenly, dementedly across the rocks and sand below — was evading him, not coming for him. He was confident his target huddled below him now, catching his breath and praying for rescue.

  McBride balanced again, testing the strength of his arms and the toe-holds he would use.

  The German voice was shouting something about making certain that McBride — he knew his name? — didn't escape by following the cliff-face around Toe Head, no, he couldn't see him against the cliff-face from where he was, and maybe the other one would take the same route, and he'd better get down onto the beach at once—

  McBride heaved himself up onto the cliff-edge, scrabbling with his feet to push him beyond his centre of gravity then pulling with his arms, his legs swinging sideways and over, finally pushing himself upright. The German shouted and the boy began turning. The rifle came round, lifting towards him as he thrust forward, cannoning into the boy — who was impossibly thin and light as soon as he touched him — and knocking him down. He rolled over with him, the rifle sandwiched between them far harder than the boy's bones under him. He hit the boy once, hard across the jaw, felt the neck snap round as if it had broken as easily as a twig, and the boy's eyes closed, his head lolled. McBride solicitously joggled the head, knew the neck was not broken — then hefted the rifle into his own hands, taking aim while he still straddled the boy, wanting only the German now that he was armed, loosing off three shots, tearing his fingers on the bolt action of the Lee Enfield that might have come from the Rising, almost certainly from a Black-and-Tan and now a family heirloom.

  The German ducked down, then began running, away beyond the car, down into a dip, then up again where McBride loosed off two more shots before the German disappeared again. Moments later, he heard the sound of an engine firing, held back and made distant by the wind from the sea but there, nevertheless, quite clearly.

  McBride stood over the boy.

  "Drummond, Drummond!" he yelled. "Get up here — quickly. Get up here!" Again, he wanted to vomit with exhaustion. Instead, he hauled the boy to his feet, held him against him tender as a lover, the rifle under his other arm.

  They'd get the bastard now — if Drummond was bloody quick enough!

  * * *

  Room T was familiar to Gilliatt, though he had hoped never to return to it. It was in no way sinister — no part of the Admiralty was that — but it had a deadening, musty, arcane quality he had long ago rejected; finally, he had thought.

  It had taken them hours to get this far, after the enervating train journey from Pembrokeshire. Swansea had been bombed again, and there had been a derailment that held them up. There was bomb rubble on the tracks just outside Paddington from the raid the previous night, and that had meant a further delay. Then the initial debriefing, then the waiting around while their reports were digested, then the summons to Room T, and a man called Walsingham and his superior officer, Rear Admiral March. The two men looked as if they h
ad been quarrelling just before summoning Gilliatt and Ashe. Gilliatt had the uncomfortable feeling of someone intruding on a family dispute. Walsingham, Gilliatt noticed, was RNVR, and it was evident from his youth and rank that he was a former civilian intelligence officer drafted into the Admiralty. Gilliatt was silently amused at the idea that he might have taken his own place. The humour of the situation gave him a sense of superiority to the room and its occupants.

  Ashe was tired, worn, drained. As if respecting an invalid, March concentrated his questions on Gilliatt. He snapped them out, primarily retracing the ground that lay tracked in the typed sheets in front of him on the table, supplementing with one or two riders to the initial debriefing. It took less than fifteen minutes, and nothing in March's voice or face indicated the weight he attached to what he asked or received in reply. Gilliatt was gradually assailed by a loss of reality surrounding what they had discovered in St George's Channel. Winnie's Welcome Mat was still out there, unbreached. March's strong, unmoving face suggested as much. The late afternoon sun behind his head haloed the white hair, tipped the ears with pink — an elderly rabbit. Nothing bad was going to happen—

  Gilliatt jerked awake. The questioning had transferred to Ashe briefly, then back to him.

  "Sir?" he fumbled.

  "What are your conclusions, Mr Gilliatt? As a former intelligence officer?" March snapped, scowling at Gilliatt and the debriefing report in turn.

  "It has to be — well, it has to be to land troops in Ireland, from the sea — I suppose."

  Walsingham, who had said little, beamed and seemed suddenly much more aware. March looked at him, momentary puzzlement hardening into a more habitual authority.

  "Very well, I'll leave Commander Walsingham to talk to you, while you and I, Captain Ashe, have our own discussion. You'll want tea sent in, Charles?" Walsingham seemed unconcerned.

  "Please," Gilliatt said.

  Ashe left like an old man being taken to a hospital ward, disturbed as to what his forthcoming tests might reveal. March was erect, and did not look back as he vacated the high-ceilinged room, its tall windows spilling light across the carpet and over Walsingham's head and shoulders, so that he squinted. A mock seafaring look, Gilliatt observed.