Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  And he knew, once he had Goessler, how to — castrate McBride, pull out his tongue. Eunuch and mute, never to speak of the secrets he knew. The violence of the images satisfied him, replaced the lingering fragility of the old man who had slipped on the wet pavement.

  * * *

  The garden was quiet, almost unreal as it slipped into night. Robert Drummond walked in it, regretting the blown roses and the drifting leaves. The house was at his back like a last line of defence, but indeed he had been driven out of its empty rooms by their heaviness of association, by the manner in which they were now only stage backcloths for the events of November forty years before. And he suspected he dwelt on those because he could not bear to consider the present, in which Claire moved like an alien life-form, entirely separate from himself yet vividly identical.

  Fanatic.

  She had the strength he had not been able to find in himself, when he came into contact with Menschler and the parachute troops and the invasion. The field-grey was too close, the swastika too vivid to be saluted like a distant love. He had been afraid, and had wanted to escape. And the thought of Michael McBride had tormented him, assumed the proportions of a vengeful god. He somehow knew that McBride had seen him with the Germans, had certainly guessed he had betrayed him to them. He was afraid of McBride, even after he learned from Menschler that the three people they'd picked up had to be McBride, his wife, and Gilliatt.

  Now, what had seemed so long ago, so unconnected with himself as the war progressed then peace followed and he was promoted, be-medalled, retired, grew prosperous — now, it was so omnipresent and so inescapable.

  He increased his pace, as if thereby he might leave the past whispering like a group of guests he could abandon, there on the paved path by the sticks of the pruned hydrangeas. Nevertheless, the past pursued him, because Claire waited for him in the most shadowy parts of the garden and he could not bring himself to face her. What was she doing to McBride, just at that moment—?

  He felt himself breathing shallowly and rapidly, but the noise was amplified in his ears, an aged roaring of protest at effort and emotional state. He turned back from the dark hedge at the bottom of the garden, ducking under the lowest branches of the apple trees he had planted soon after the death of his wife — the brief quiet guest in the house who had left him his daughter in his own image and then subsided into a harmless non-being — and feeling his old heart strain at that slight evocation of physical health and suppleness. When he straightened, the white house shimmered in the gloom and seemed very distant. He began to hurry towards it, feeling his chest constrict like an iron band about his lungs, and the old heart bump and shudder.

  He looked around him, turning to and fro as if in a strange place, and the darkness of the garden pressed upon him, sidling closer, embracing him. His foot slipped on the edge of the paved path and his heel sank into soft dark earth. He even registered the crushing of next year's bulbs beneath the soil. Then his heart seemed to tear open, then collapse on itself like a dwarf star, drawing him into blackness. He teetered off-balance and slid sideways to the ground, his hands clutching air as if fighting off the approach of night.

  November 1940

  The Oberst had had them removed to a barn on the edge of Lickowen and placed under guard — the Bavarian sergeant and the young Schutze who had first spotted them at the crossroads — while he contacted Menschler at Crosswinds Farm, his co-ordination HQ. The colonel seemed at a loss as to what to do with, or to them. He was a soldier, and when Menschler ordered him to interrogate the prisoners he felt a reluctance and incompetence grow in him all the way back to the shadowy barn in the misty drizzle. He felt cold and wet and full of forebodings.

  Gilliatt watched the Oberst return and made an effort to smoke his cigarette in an unconcerned manner. The German parachute colonel seemed uncertain of himself or his task, and Gilliatt drew a quiet, sedative strength from the way in which the German approached him, adopted a swagger, tried to enforce himself upon his prisoner. He ignored McBride and Maureen, sitting side by side on a hay-bale a little apart from Gilliatt.

  "How much do you know about our operations?" the Oberst asked.

  Gilliatt smiled. "A great deal, Colonel." He spoke deliberately in German. "The British government and the Admiralty have known about Emerald Necklace for some time. I myself was aboard one of the minesweepers when your channel was detected. We knew immediately what it was, what was intended—"

  "So, where are your troops, where is the Irish army?" the colonel asked, regaining confidence.

  Gilliatt shrugged. "I'm not the military planner for this operation."

  "Who are you?"

  "Lt Peter Gilliatt, Royal Naval Reserve." The colonel seemed puzzled. "Who are you, Colonel?"

  "Why is a sailor here, dressed in civilian clothes?"

  "Fishing holiday." Gilliatt was amazed at his own confidence, born entirely out of their exchange. The Oberst struck him across the face, and Gilliatt's confidence crumbled because he had been too clever and the German officer was getting angry at his own impotence. Blood was warm and salty in his mouth. He wiped his lips, spat out the blood and saliva. The colonel seemed satisfied with the badge of his hurt.

  "Don't be stupid. You're spying on us, mm? Who are these others?"

  "Irish citizens — friends of mine. Guides.

  "Spies?"

  "In their own country — don't be stupid." The colonel struck Gilliatt again, snapping his head up, tipping him backwards against stacked bales of hay where he lay drunkenly looking up at the German colonel. One of his back teeth felt loose, amid the blood from inside his cheek and from the dulled impressions of his bitten, swollen tongue. It angered him unreasoningly. The whole scene was a farce, anyway, comic-book Hun interrogating a prisoner, lots of master-race face-slapping — a charade whose reality he could not accept. He was telling the stupid Kraut everything — it was the reverse of the usual prisoner-interrogator scene anyway — and the silly man wanted to beat him up because his nice secret plan was up the spout. Gilliatt sat up, nursing his cheek and mouth.

  "Listen, you stupid bloody Hun! I'm telling you what you want to know, can't you understand that? You've been rumbled, your lovely secret plan isn't a secret any more. I don't know what the British government is doing about it, but by now you can be sure they know you've landed. So, I should get down to the beaches and wait for tonight and see what turns up!"

  He fell back against the bales, exhausted by his outburst. The parachute colonel stood in front of him, mouth agape and hands at his sides, for a long time. Then he turned on his heel and stamped out of the barn. Gilliatt shook his head, probing at the back tooth. Definitely loose. Damn. He looked up, to find the Bavarian sergeant laughing. When Gilliatt looked at him, he closed up his face again.

  Maureen moved across to him, touching his face gently, staring into his eyes regretfully and with admonition behind that. In a moment, she might be scolding him like a child.

  "I'm all right," he said thickly, turning his head aside to spit out more blood.

  "Open your mouth," she ordered. He did so. She inspected it, then nodded. "You'll live." Her eyes, however, were more tender than her voice. McBride stood behind her.

  "How am I doing?" Gilliatt asked softly.

  "Brilliantly, if you want to get us all shot," McBride replied. Gilliatt smiled painfully. His lips were puffing out now from the colonel's blows. "I can see your point, but will it do any good?"

  "It might. Have you any ideas?" Gilliatt watched the Bavarian sergeant, moving slowly closer now that their voices were quiet and they were speaking in English.

  "I'm going to get out of here, fairly soon. Tonight at the latest," McBride remarked, squatting next to his wife and staring abstractedly at the strewn, crushed hay between his feet. Maureen looked viperously at him.

  "You're mad, the pair of you," she breathed angrily. "You'll get yourselves killed, why not accept it? You are out of the stupid, dangerous game." She stood up, looking t
he Bavarian sergeant up and down. "Men!" she snorted contemptuously. "Little boys playing soldiers!"

  The German was nonplussed. She walked away from him, arms folded across her breasts, her steps strutting and angry. Gilliatt watched her, grateful for her angry solicitousness. When he looked into McBride's eyes, there was a recognition between them. McBride's face narrowed in anger.

  "You want Drummond, don't you? That's all you want, isn't it?" McBride grinned savagely, and nodded. "You don't even know he had anything to do with the Germans, dammit! What's the matter with you?"

  McBride seemed compelled to consider the question that was only intended as an insult. After a moment, he said, "I don't know. I wonder at what I'm finding out about myself — you know that? I'm not too fond of it."

  "Stop it, then."

  McBride shook his head. "No, I won't do that, Peter. I find it strangely satisfying." He saw Gilliatt looking beyond him, at Maureen. "Strange," he said, as if he had been asked another question. "I don't even regret Maureen all that much. I feel — under the anaesthetic, maybe."

  Gilliatt was puzzled, and appalled. Then the mood was broken by the sound of a small car approaching the barn. They listened, McBride's face contracting and expanding almost as if the muscles beneath the skin were breathing heavily. Gilliatt looked up as the car door slammed and there were footsteps across the yard outside. McBride evidently expected Drummond.

  The man who stepped through the door had the raincoat and cap of one of their pursuers. It might have been another man, but he was certainly Irish. IRA. He grinned as McBride turned and looked at him. The two men recognized each other.

  When McBride turned away again, Gilliatt said, "Who is he?"

  "Riordan — he runs the Ross Carbery and district chapter. He probably shot Maureen's Da, or had him shot. If he's left to guard us, then God help him." McBride's hands clenched and unclenched. Gilliatt felt distanced from him, further than ever before. Beneath the smiling, almost boyish adventurer's exterior there was something cold and dangerous that this situation had force-fed. He was a film star whose screen image masked a filthy or perverted private character. Gilliatt could find no more appropriate an analogy. He couldn't understand McBride and wanted a view of him that explained him in stark monochrome and not in shades of grey. He was more than a little mad, perhaps, and certainly a killer.

  McBride moved away, as if sensing the bent of Gilliatt's reflections, and Gilliatt went on caricaturing him for the sake of his own mental comfort.

  * * *

  Churchill entered one of the small operations rooms in the command bunker beneath the Admiralty building set aside for the select team he had assembled to deal with what he now officially termed Emerald. He had taken personal command of the operation, and its classification for security was the highest possible. On the wall immediately in front of him was a map of the British Isles, to which a It commander from the Tracking Room was attaching pins to show the position of the channel that the Germans had swept. Churchill allowed himself a gruff, barking laugh at the handwriting which described the minefield by its nickname. He saw Walsingham in consultation with two officers, a major and a colonel, from the War Office's Co-ordination of Intelligence Branch, and signalled him to join him. Two armchairs and a cocktail cabinet had incongruously been added to the linoleum-floored, concrete-walled room. Churchill slumped into one of these, noticing the patch of striped shirt that had pushed itself from beneath his waistcoat, tucked it back into his waistband, and placed his hat on the small table beside his chair.

  Walsingham waited, and the Prime Minister indicated the drinks cabinet. Walsingham poured the old man a large brandy which Churchill swiftly demolished. Then he indicated that Walsingham should sit. Around them, the work of the room continued like the soft and constant hum of machinery. The two minelayers were indicated on the map, already well into the British-swept channel and approaching the German sweep. For its part, the army intelligence unit the War Office had assigned to Emerald was working at a papier-mache relief-model on a table, the Brittany coast divided by a strip of board from the Irish coast from Cork to Mizzen Head. The relief-models had been hastily painted green, brown and blue, and around the sea inlets and the beaches were marker flags and along the coast were model soldiers in field-grey.

  Churchill studied Walsingham. The younger man felt uncomfortable under his gaze, while at the same moment he was aware of some intense inward debate, as if the old man looked inward with one eye, towards him with the other. Churchill's proximity unnerved him. The man emanated will, ruthlessness, energy. He was unsparing and unforgiving, perhaps most evidently with himself. The blue eyes were intent, dissatisfied with the corpulent, flagging body which the mind inhabited. The eyes and their gaze seemed totally an instrument of the man's intellect and nothing to do with the ageing sack of the flesh. Churchill puffed at his cigar.

  "What do we know, Commander? How many troops have the Nazis dropped into County Cork?"

  "The weather has been too bad for any aerial reconnaissance of the area, Prime Minister." Churchill's face creased in irritation. "But we have reports which suggest the number of planes they used was very small. We don't think they could have landed anything like a division in one drop."

  "How many?"

  Two or three rifle regiments, signals unit, perhaps — not much more than that."

  "A holding operation."

  "Would you like to see our guesswork as to their dispositions?"

  "In a moment. What are the reports from France?"

  "Sir, we can explain it better if you'd look at the models," Walsingham persisted. Churchill looked across the room as if reluctant. Then he heaved himself out of the deep armchair, teetered for a moment but shrugged away Walsingham's supporting hand, and then crossed the room with a conscious determination in his step. The colonel from the Army Intelligence Unit snapped to attention. Walsingham noticed the way in which Churchill seemed to enjoy the subordination of the people around him, their punctilious awareness of his importance. A commander-in-chief rather than a Prime Minister. Had he painted at Chartwell all those years just for moments like this?

  "Now, Colonel. Explain." Churchill dabbed at the Brittany model. Cigar ash dropped into the blue-painted sea off Brest, and the colonel delicately blew it away, dispersing it over the flat painted paper of the Atlantic. The colonel then dabbed towards the model with a pointer. A grey toy soldier with a rifle.

  "Yesterday, according to aerial reconnaissance, these units of parachute troops were moved from here down to the airfields here—" He picked out the marked airfields one by one. "There were a number of transport planes at each which had arrived the previous night. These units—" He picked out two other toy soldiers, standing above Plabennec, " — were moved down to the harbour area. As definitely as we can tell from photographs and from what the man McBride brought back with him, they are two infantry divisions. Also, we have vague reports from the local network that engineer units — Panzers — have also been on the move towards Brest. That's more or less it."

  Churchill was silent for a while then: "What are the latest weather reports?"

  "They'll sail tonight."

  "Who will come first?"

  "One of the divisions will send in infantry, there'll be signals — at least a couple of abteilungen — recce units, engineers. They'll want a bridgehead—" Already, it was evident that Churchill's eyes had strayed towards the Irish coast model, via the wall map which revealed that the two minelayers had moved into the gap of the German-swept channel. He pointed with the cigar.

  "What do we know about the dispositions here?" He waggled the cigar along the coast of County Cork.

  "Difficult, sir," the colonel offered apologetically. "We've very few reports from Drummond's rather poor intelligence network, and we've no aerial reconnaissance."

  "But—?"

  "We estimate there were four landings at least, possibly five or six. To secure the beaches, since they landed so close to the coast in each cas
e." He pointed towards the field-grey toy soldiers. "We know they landed here—" Near Kilbrittain and the Old Head of Kinsale. "And here." Rosscarbery Bay. "On that basis, we've selected the likeliest beaches for landings, and the easiest to hold — here, here and here." Toe Head Bay, Clonakilty Bay, Glandore Harbour. Churchill nodded. A toy soldier loomed over each shallow inlet of the sea, carrying a rifle across his body. Churchill turned to Walsingham.

  "What do you hear of the Republic's army?"

  "Our intelligence sources in Dublin are indicating that the Irish are sitting tight, sir." Churchill nodded. "They're still gathering their own intelligence. There's an alert, all leave canceled, a lot of meetings and consultations between the army and the government—"

  "And it doesn't amount to more than piss and wind," Churchill snapped. "They won't want to go up against crack parachute troops. God, they saw what happened to us at Dunkirk! Who could blame them?" He rubbed his nose. "They need our help, but they're not asking for it. Strict neutrality. I know they've been in touch with Berlin—" He smiled at the sharing of one of his secrets. "Apparently, the Fuhrer is denying all knowledge of such troop landings and is assuring the Irish government he continues to recognize their neutrality. Gentlemen, it's up to us, I'm afraid. We must look out for ourselves. Now, what can we do?"

  The intelligence colonel cleared his throat. "We could land a couple of regiments today. The Dorsets and the Herefords are on full alert. They've not been told why."

  "Colonel, you know it would take today to get them to the coast and aboard suitable vessels, even if we had them. By tomorrow night, they might have begun to disembark in Cork harbour, if we were very lucky." He paused while the colonel flushed slightly. "Very well, get them to the coast, Bristol or Cardiff, as quickly as possible. Just bodies — forget heavy equipment. I will talk to the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic and inform him that dockside facilities will be required in Cobh or Cork tomorrow. You have a list of vessels in Bristol and Cardiff—" Walsingham looked into Churchill's eyes, and shook his head. "Get one!"