by Craig Thomas
Walsingham wandered over to the fireplace, and seemed to study the dwarfed gas fire that squatted in it. He leaned on the high, cream-painted mantelpiece almost in a deliberate pose of abstraction. Then he turned to Gilliatt.
"I believe you," he said simply.
"Is it a question of belief?"
"It might be. No one here wants to believe it, of that you may be certain. To their Lordships, it would be the last straw. Tell me — how do you think the Germans would have swept the minefield?"
Gilliatt studied Walsingham across the room. There was something almost obsessive about him, a barely-restrained energy. Obscurely, Gilliatt didn't like him, aware at the same time that he might only be disliking a former self.
"Submarine, on the surface, probably."
"Yes, I have other opinions that would confirm that. How would they land troops, then?"
"Ship?" Gilliatt realized he was being led to ponder the darkest unpleasantries; invited to contemplate disaster by the bland voice. "No — submarine again. Their biggest U-boats could transport eighty to a hundred men — each."
"How many troops could they land in one night?" Walsingham was almost crouching towards him by the fireplace, demanding an answer that confirmed his worst suspicions.
Gilliatt considered. "Close to two thousand if they had the subs — and the weather."
"And what about the present weather, Lieutenant Gilliatt?"
After a long silence, Gilliatt, appalled, said, "I would — would consider the weather good enough, at present."
"Exactly!" Walsingham's glance at the ceiling was almost theatrical, his face slightly flushed, his body alert with nerves. "Exactly!" He studied Gilliatt for a moment, then nodded. "Lieutenant Gilliatt, I am familiar with your record, and you can be of use to me. You'll consider yourself re-assigned, pending confirmation."
Before Gilliatt could protest, Walsingham had gone, leaving Gilliatt to wander to the window and look morosely down at Horse Guards Parade and St James's Park. Walsingham's enthusiasm confirmed more dire prognostications than Ashe and March put together. He did not wish to become involved any closer with the fate of his country.
* * *
McBride bundled the IRA youth into the back of the Morris and climbed in after him. Drummond took the wheel, started the engine, and screeched off along the cliff-road looking for a junction with the track the German had taken inland.
"Come on, start explaining!" McBride snapped, his hand in the stuff of the youth's sweater, bunching it under his chin. "Where is our friend heading?"
The youth shook his head. Carroty hair, freckles, pale skin. Scared stiff, but stubborn. He'd taken oaths, belonged—
"Ask him which way — again," Drummond offered.
"Where are you from?" McBride asked, leaning against the youth. The leather of the bench-seat creaked. Drummond stopped the car, and turned in his seat.
"Which way?" he demanded.
"We are going to find out, you know," McBride said with a smile, letting go of the sweater, taking out cigarettes. "We'll all have a quiet smoke, and then we'll have a talk, mm?"
The youth took the cigarette, McBride lit it, the boy coughed, looked defiant, then dragged deeply. Suddenly, he appeared very vulnerable, and aware of the closeness of the car around him, the proximity of the two tall men much older — and wiser and more ruthless, no doubt — than he. He coughed again.
"English cigarettes, eh?" McBride said, his accent slightly broader than before. "Like everything else, they're not for the Irish, eh, lad?"
"Why are you working for them, McBride?" the lad snapped back, nodding at Drummond. "We know all about you, McBride—" He flinched as McBride's face hardened.
"Now, that's not the way to get out of here in one piece, lad. What's your name?"
A long hesitation, then: "Dermot."
Tearse, O" Connell, Yeats, Gonne, Casement — which is it?" The boy appeared puzzled, then realized he was being mocked. "You've joined then, have you?" The boy nodded. "So, Dermot, you've got a bloody great gun, and you're told to go and blow my head off — and you nearly did, mm? But it isn't quite the same as shooting pheasants or crows, is it?" The boy disliked the turn of the conversation. "How old are you, Dermot?"
"Twenty—"
"Grow a moustache, Dermot. If you're over eighteen, I'm a Black-and-Tan. And just say I am and I'll push all your teeth down your throat, Dermot."
The humour and the threats disturbed Dermot. Drummond turned away on cue, just as the boy began to look to him as a silent, and therefore rational, being.
"Piss off, you—" The flinch was just below the surface, the shudder one layer of skin too deep to show. But McBride knew Dermot was hanging onto his new identity in the IRA. The German probably meant nothing to him at that moment.
"That's a brave lad. They'll give you a martyr's funeral, no doubt of it. I'll tell them you were spitting defiance up to the last." He paused, smiling, then: "You little cunt, you tried to kill me! You're going to pay for that—" He opened the door, and pulled the boy bodily across the back seat and out of the car after him. Without hesitation, he dragged him to the cliff-edge, then held him at arms" length, teetering on the edge, body inclined so that if McBride released him he would be unable to regain his balance, would fall. "You've tried to kill your last Irishman, Dermot — your last anything!" The wind plucked at Dermot's grey mackintosh, at his red hair, His face was shining with a ghostly paleness. His eyes kept moving from the beach below to McBride's pitiless face. "You think it's like the Boy Scouts, do you, Dermot? It isn't lad, it isn't. You've joined the scum, the bombers and the assassins — the comedians of destruction! You're going over, Dermot. I'm going to save your soul, Dermot. Save you from yourself! There's time, Dermot — start saying your confession. Absolution follows!" He bellowed with laughter. Dermot screamed. McBride loosened his grip on the boy's arm, then jerked him backwards. Dermot collapsed on the grass in a faint. Vomit leaked thinly from the corner of his mouth. McBride turned him over so that he would not choke on it.
When Dermot regained consciousness, he found himself back in the car, a tartan rug wrapped round him.
Drummond pressed a flask of rum to his lips. He coughed as he swallowed, but the drink seemed to revive memories, and his eyes darted in his head. He was obviously looking for McBride.
"I've sent him for a walk, to calm down. But, you did try to kill us, Dermot. It did make him angry."
"He's mad," Dermot mumbled, swigging again at the rum. "McBride is as mad as a hatter, mister!"
"Tell me — why you, Dermot?"
A long silence in which Drummond could almost hear the fragile raft of Dermot's recent oaths strain and break against the rocks of immediate experience.
Dermot told Drummond everything — which wasn't much. He'd been available, had a gun — once his father's, his grandfather's originally — and the German had needed help. He'd been ordered to give it. The German hadn't joined up with any other Germans, as far as he knew. Yes, the Skibbereen Battalion was giving help to the Germans — how many? Three or four since Dermot joined. Yes, they were still about—
Eventually, the little cargo of information had diminished to nothing. Drummond was certain of it. He said, "Right-ho, Dermot, on your way." The boy was nonplussed and did not move. Drummond opened the rear door for him, waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "Go, and sin no more," he added, then: "Dermot, you're free to go — go and tell them you got away from us, you told us nothing, what the devil you like — but go!"
Dermot scrambled out of the Morris and away, soon disappearing behind a dip of the headland, coat-tails flying behind him. After a while, Drummond lit a cigarette, and McBride rolled out from underneath the car, stood up and brushed himself off, and joined Drummond.
"Fat lot of use he was, our Dermot," he observed. "Quite a good choice by our German friend. Young enough not to think of the consequences, and young enough, too, to know nothing."
"We'll not get anything out of the Skibberee
n Battalion. A dead end, if they're protecting German agents."
"You know — I would have thrown him over if I thought that way I could have done him the favour of keeping him out of their hands — and if I could be ruthless enough."
"Michael — you mean it, don't you?"
"Yes. Oh, you didn't know they killed my father, did you? No wonder it came as a surprise to you." Drummond studied McBride, who was staring through the windscreen, memory racing. He could ask no more questions.
"What do you think?"
"If they want to get rid of us, then I think they must be very close to whatever they have planned. It's so out of character for those Skibbereen clowns, they're being hard-pressed by someone else. God, they think the Germans are going to help them unite Ireland! No, forget it—" McBride was talking almost to himself." They must be scared stiff of us — not because of who we are or what we know, but just because of what they're up to! We're a danger just because we're here — now, tell me what it might be."
* * *
Rear Admiral March was sufficiently alarmed by the debriefing of Gilliatt and Ashe that he allowed himself to be badgered into calling a consultative meeting in Room T which would consider QIC's response to the German sweeping of the St George's Channel minefield. The Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre had failed, during the first year of the war, to develop its resources of cryptanalysts and air reconnaissance to a degree which would provide the Intelligence Division and the Director of Naval Intelligence with an understanding of German naval intentions and planning. QIC had had to take its share of blame for the fiasco of the Norwegian operation in April of 1940, and had been among those most relieved by Hitler's cancellation of Sea Lion in October. Recent history made an uncomfortable extra presence in the room as Walsingham, with Ashe's chart pinned to an easel near his chair, rose to address the men he had been able to gather together for the early evening meeting. March sat at the head of the table, Walsingham at his right, a Wren stenographer on his left. A lieutenant from the Tracking Room — an ex-submarine navigator and an expert on German-swept channels — sat nearest the betraying chart, and had been studying it since his arrival. A commander from the office of the Director of Minesweeping was deputizing for his chief, and Walsingham had managed to persuade a lieutenant-commander from the Anti-Submarine Warfare Division of the Admiralty to delay his date with an actress.
Walsingham looked once at March, who studied the reports and pictures in front of him studiously. Each man in the room had a duplicated set. Walsingham, looking at the mostly young faces, at the insufficiency of gold braid around the uniform cuffs displayed on the table, felt a momentary qualm. This was most definitely the sixth-form debating society in terms of the Admiralty's hierarchy. How long would it take him to get from there to the headmaster's study?
The image daunted him, but it also amused and challenged him.
"Gentlemen, you've all had time to study the reports and photographs before you, albeit hurriedly. I think our first priority—" He glanced at March again — "is to establish that the St George's Channel minefield has been swept by the Germans. Barry, your opinion?"
The young lieutenant from the Tracking Room seemed startled out of his assiduous attention to Ashe's chart. He blinked.
"Yes, sir. There are no orders for a British sweep — sorry, only that carried out by the Bisley and her flotilla. No north-south sweep by us. And from Lieutenant Gilliatt's detailed description, I think it's certain the Germans swept this using submarines on the surface. At night. It has the marks of a German sweep, much like one of their own swept channels—" He glanced at the DMS's deputy, who nodded.
"Commander?" Walsingham asked.
"Yes, you've spoken to the DMS already. You know that it was swept by the German Navy, and how they did it."
"Thank you, Commander. It would seem to be our next priority to try to understand the movement of German naval vessels as they might be affected by this sweep. Chris?"
The lieutenant commander from ASW Division said immediately, "What you want to know is — did we spot those U-boats of yours on Guernsey, and where are they now?"
The Tracking Room lieutenant, Barry, chuckled. Walsingham nodded his head as if Chris had scored a neat point.
"Did you?"
"We did. That many heavy-duty submarines were tracked from Brest to Guernsey. But we didn't know they ever left Guernsey — this sweep was done at night, which would explain our oversight. Ask Tracking Room—"
"Barry?"
"We — don't know where they are now. When you came to see me the other day, I got onto it. If they've left Guernsey, then they did that at night, too. They haven't emerged from any other base — not as far as we can tell."
There was a sense in the room, Walsingham was aware, that those present had been carefully, cleverly orchestrated, and that they were reciting lines long prepared, like suggestions that Walsingham might have planted in them under hypnosis.
"I have information from Guernsey which suggests that the sheds are now empty. Would the U-boats return to normal wolfpack duty, Chris?"
"It seems likely. They must be back in Brest by now, then. Neither we nor Tracking Room have registered any of those designations at sea in the past four days."
Walsingham nodded. "We'll go on. What, gentlemen, was the object of converting those heavy-duty U-boats — which the German Navy cannot easily spare from North Atlantic duty — to sweep that channel?"
March said, "You're preparing your ground here, Charles. But we already know what you think. Do you want us to vote on it?" The sarcasm was abrasive, crude.
"Gentlemen, I had a suggestion earlier in the day which made me think. It was suggested — by Lieutenant Gilliatt — that perhaps two thousand front-line Wehrmacht troops could be transported in a single night from the coast of France to the coast of southern Ireland, by submarine. Is that feasible, do you think?"
Chris from ASW Division was first to speak. "Mm. It's a small force — but it's less noisy and a lot more efficient than dropping parachutists in large numbers. I'm not a military expert. Those subs you found in Guernsey could do the job—"
"Very well. When was any one of those U-boats last recorded on anti-convoy duty?"
Barry said, "I checked those numbers off. Two weeks ago, U-99 was seen returning to Brest, moving on the surface at dawn. Spotted by an unarmed Coastal Command Anson. It dived, but they got the number. The others are earlier sightings."
"And no one's seen them since then, until Guernsey, and not since then?" Heads were shaken, the commander from DMS was now intrigued, converted. March remained with his head bent over the papers on the table, unwilling to accede to the slowly mounting barometric excitement in the tall room. "Very well, where are they, and what are they doing? My man saw them in Guernsey stripped down — even the gun was missing — and rigged for sweeping duties. Those duties, we know, were completed. Now they are no longer in Guernsey — are they in Brest, and what are they doing there?" Walsingham held up two glossy prints. "Air reconnaissance pictures of Brest, taken yesterday. The weather was good enough—"
"These don't even show the harbour, certainly not the U-boat pens—" Barry objected. March nodded in agreement.
"No. But, if you look carefully, you will see an unusually large concentration of military equipment." He tapped at each picture in turn. "Other pictures record the same sort of movements — troop movements — in and around Brest. An expert in this sort of thing from Army Intelligence is prepared to bet that there are at least two new divisions in the immediate Brest area, just on the basis of the transport he can pick out on these pictures. Unfortunately, we don't have other pictures of the area behind Brest. At present. But we should have some by tomorrow." He smiled in March's direction, acknowledging a concession. "If those new troops in Brest have any connection with the submarines we suspect are back in Brest, what can we conclude from that?"
The question elicited only silence, until March spoke. He stood up, and spoke slow
ly and distinctly, his teeth almost closed together. The veins stood out on his neck. All the time, he continued to look at the table in front of him.
"Gentlemen, this meeting is closed. Thank you for your time. I do not need to remind you that these matters are to be discussed with no one outside this room. I apologize for any sense of anti-climax you may now feel." He glared at Walsingham. "Commander, if you'll come with me—"
He walked out of the room, followed by Walsingham. The Wren finished her shorthand, and the three naval officers stared at the door through which March and Walsingham had retreated, then at each other. They appeared like children robbed of the ending of a new, and absorbing, bedtime story.
When March had sat down at his desk, and Walsingham had closed the oak door behind them, he barked at the junior officer with an anger that Walsingham had never seen unleashed before. He had pressured, even embarrassed, the Rear Admiral in a deliberately cavalier manner. And the Admiral knew he was being pressured.
"Don't you ever try to do that to me again, young man!" March's eyes burned. He let Walsingham continue standing like a recalcitrant in front of his desk. "You tried to force me to side with you, fall in with whatever ridiculous scheme you have in mind! I will not be blackmailed into agreeing with you out of embarrassment! You arrogant young puppy!" Then March subsided into silence, staring broodingly at his blotter, at the papers he had carried with him from the conference room. Walsingham stood very still, staring at the portrait of the King that hung behind the Admiral's desk; George VI, King-Emperor, in full naval uniform. A little, thin gleam of patriotism came and went, ousting the arrogance of conviction, the personal quality of the course on which he had embarked. Then March spoke again, tiredly. "What did you attempt to persuade me to do, Charles?"
"Sir, I'd like to put someone into Brest, immediately, to recce for those U-boats, even to look at the troop dispositions."
