Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  Emerald Decision

  Craig Thomas

  This is the story of a secret Nazi plan to invade Ireland during world war two.

  It is told jumping between the past, and the exploits of a secret agent working for the British, and the present when an American author is researching for his planned book.

  However the information he is uncovering is dangerous and people are trying to bury it.

  There follows death, danger and violence and at the heart of it all the mystery of the American authors father

  Craig Thomas (writing as David Grant)

  Emerald Decision

  A British agent uncovers a secret nest of Nazi submarines, German agents mysteriously multiply in Ireland and a massive Nazi prachute drop is imminent somewhere in Britain. This is the background for Craig Thomas's exciting story of a secret action so lethal and unorthodox that all traces of it were instantly obliterated until a top American author after the war sought information for a new novel and during the course of his research uncovered the mystery of his father.

  Emerald Decision is the second of two novels written by David Grant. Perhaps it wasn't published under the name Craig Thomas as it didn't include any of the recurring characters which he'd established in the first four books.

  Or perhaps it's because there isn't an animal in the title.

  In fact we get two books in one. Both stories unfold together and in some places cleverly mirror each other's action. In 1940 an Anglo-Irish spy called McBride is uncovering German U-Boats and agents in the South of Ireland. In 1980 his American son is doing research for his latest in a string of popular history books. Were the Germans preparing to invade Ireland? For both men there are those who would rather the truth remained uncovered.

  This book remained out of print until 1987 when Collins started to publish Thomas' books starting with Winter Hawk. Their paperback imprint, Fontana, had previously published Emerald Decision so now a revised edition appeared with the name Craig Thomas prominently displayed. Changes inside mainly involved the changing of the date 'October 1980' to 'October 198-' and references to the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement were inserted to make things more topical.

  Dedicated to:

  for MY FATHER, who talked of the minefield that led to the decision and In Memoriam E.R.D. and.B.B. Friends

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to express my thanks to my father, Bryn Thomas, a former minesweeping officer, for his invaluable assistance during the writing of this book. It was his wartime recollections that prompted the story of the novel, and his expertise that contributed in no small measure to the descriptions of naval activity. Also, my gratitude to Wilfrid and Ada White, my wife's parents, for their memories of the Blitz in London.

  Of the numerous texts consulted during the period of research for the book, I would like to mention in particular Roskill's The War at Sea, vol. 1 (HMSO) and Beesly's Very Special Intelligence (Hamish Hamilton).

  My thanks, and affection, to Simon King for his enthusiasm for the project.

  PART ONE

  Ancient History

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Visit to the Oberst

  October 198-

  McBride had spoken to many former Wehrmacht officers, all of them reduced to scribbled private shorthand in his notebooks, or become disembodied voices on cassette tapes. Yet Menschler was different, if only in that he was more intensely reminiscent of a former self than the others. He was different, and not merely because he was blind; the lines of visible scar-tissue were like pointing accusations, perspective lines drawn to the dead eyes. Menschler was complete in another way, in the entirety with which he chose to inhabit the past, to walk corridors long disused — even the final corridors of the Führerbunker. His almost total recall promised well for McBride, chilling and fascinating him as they sat in the blind man's living-room in the wooden house on Norderney, in the East Frisians.

  McBride was seated facing the window, perhaps two or three yards from the desk where Menschler sat, his back to the window and its square of grey sky and choppy sea nibbling at the stretch of beach below the house. The house had seemed an outpost as he had approached it on foot along the beach road. It was a summer house — Menschler lived there all year, and had done since the early 1950s, when his prison sentence was commuted by a West German court. It seemed to McBride that he had chosen this flat, windy splinter of the Bundesrepublik out of a total disapproval of post-war Germany. Hermitage, or place of exile.

  The furniture in this main room was old, heavy, dark. Polished by his caresses rather than by creams or waxes. Even the way in which Menschler gripped the arms of his chair at that moment suggested both possession and defiance. And he had the trick of looking directly at his visitor's face as he listened or spoke, and not in a vague direction over one of McBride's shoulders. His blind eyes seemed disconcertingly aware in the room and its fading early evening light.

  Smaragdenhalskette — Emerald Necklace — Smaragdenhalskette—

  McBride's thoughts pushed impatiently, nudging him into speech. For the moment, he resisted the temptation to broach the real subject of his visit, while Menschler spoke of the last days, when his Germany had gone up in flames with two bodies in the grounds of the Reichschancellery. McBride wished, half-attentively, that he had obtained Menschler's first-hand impressions for his previous book.

  "The Führer surrounded himself with SS trash in those last days—" They were speaking in German, a language in which the American, McBride, was fluent. The contempt, the hatred of the army's displacement by the SS was undimmed by the slow blind passage of forty years. "Even while their glorious leader, with his bowel trouble and his belief in sorcery, was doing away with himself like a rat taking poison—"

  Four days before, in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, McBride had found the most tangible reference to Emerald Necklace, in a private letter written by Menschler to his cousin, a Junker Generalleutnant on the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht staff in Berlin, whose papers had been bequeathed to the Koblenz archives on his death in the early "60s. And unlike the memories of other men to whom he had spoken, or the official records, there had been no OKW censorship or editing. A private letter which referred to a top-secret army matter had survived intact, been waiting for him at the end of a long and fruitless search for a proposed operation that had never received the usual Fall — Case — designation used by OKW for France, Russia, Britain, Poland, Crete, Africa.

  His book had begun as a sober treatise designed to enhance his academic status and reputation. The Politics of Invasion: the Führer and his Wehrmacht, 1939-42. Sober enough for any narrow-minded, conservative faculty board. McBride shrugged the image away. That was all before Gates of Hell, eighteen weeks on the New York Times list in hardcover, a million copies in print in softcover—

  And he'd returned to his treatise, seeking to inject it with popular appeal, dynamism, something new. And Emerald Necklace, a name in a dusty Pentagon file of agents" reports from 1940, a name overheard or dimly remembered by a handful of Germans still living — and a reference in a letter dated October 1940 from Oberst Karl Menschler, a name he already knew dimly from his researches on Fall Gelb, the invasion of France, and from the planning group of Seelowe, Hitler's proposed and abandoned invasion of Britain.

  McBride knew the war held few beneficial secrets to ambitious historians, especially one who had chosen the market-place to make his mark rather than the groves of academe that had seemed to slight and undervalue him for so long. All the bodies had been dug up. Babi Yar, the Cossacks handed over to Stalin's mercy, Katyn, the Final Solution, the atom bomb, had all received their popular historical exploitation. But — Emerald Necklace. If it was real, then it was new. No one had done it, no one even knew of it—
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  His hand had quivered, his breath seeming to be held throughout, as he read and re-read Menschler's letter to his cousin.

  Now, Menschler seemed to subside like a kettle gone off the boil. He sat stiff-backed in the chair, staring at McBride's features as if he could read their expression, or as if demanding that he make some comment on what he had heard. McBride coughed, watched a seagull lifted then plucked from its course by the wind off the sea, and picked out the painted dark strip of the German mainland subsiding into shadow five miles away on the horizon.

  "Herr Menschler, thank you. Perhaps I could take you — unless you're tired — back to France in 1940?" McBride wondered whether his voice betrayed his excitement, his anxiety. Menschler's face was partly in shadow, but he was certain that the head moved slightly, a small flinch at the tone or subject.

  "Yes, Herr Professor?"

  McBride paused on the edge of the moment. His journey in a rented blue Audi from Koblenz up the Rhine into flatter and flatter northern Germany the previous day had effectively depressed his tension and anticipation. The short ferry journey, leaving the Audi on the jetty at Norddeich, in the company of a few late holiday-makers from Hamburg and the Ruhr crossing to Norderney for an off-season, cheap-rate ten days, had increased his sense of possible foolishness, of chasing after a whim and looking very, very dumb. The flat, uninteresting Frisian island held no promise as the ferry neared the old village and its tiny jetty.

  Yet Menschler was real, and alive, and he had written the letters in the Bundesarchiv. He could be a few minutes away from the new heart of his book, and its probable status as a best-seller — including the six-figure, maybe seven-figure softcover advance—

  On the edge of the moment, he indulged the comforting, comfortable prognostications. Print-runs, contracts, sales figures. A new, unknown invasion— a rewriting of history? A strange, bubbling excitement in him was compounded by the clear memory of his telephone conversation with Menschler two days earlier; the Oberst had been frostily polite, but reluctant, as if for him, too, the proposed meeting was heavy with significance.

  "You were on the support planning staff for Fall Gelb, and later for Seelowe?" Menschler nodded, but after a pause. Had the facts come back only slowly, or did he anticipate what might follow the slightest admission? "What happened, Herr Oberst, after Seelowe was postponed indefinitely on October 12th, 1940?"

  "What do you mean, Herr Professor, what happened? We did not invade England, that is what happened."

  "I mentioned a letter you had written — one of three or four — to your second cousin, Generalleutnant Alfred von Kass on—"

  " The 23rd of October."

  "Yes. Could I ask you about that?"

  The silence seemed to continue for a long time, and the room's weight of furniture and memory pressed upon McBride with a tangible presence. He felt enclosed.

  "Why? It was a private letter. Much better to ask concerning Fall Gelb, or Seelowe — I can give you many insights, my memory is excellent."

  "Yes, Herr Menschler. I appreciate that. But I'm interested in Smaragdenhalskette, the Emerald Necklace you referred to in the letter. It wasn't a family heirloom."

  Menschler's face remained unmoved at the remark.

  "Perhaps not—"

  "You said, and I quote—"

  "I recollect exactly what I wrote." The voice placed McBride, made him a reporter, an amanuensis and nothing more. It canceled the inbred German esteem for his academic title. Now he was little more than a busybody from the gutter press.

  "Why are you reluctant, sir? It's forty years ago."

  "Reluctant?"

  "There is something — but you won't talk about it." McBride suppressed a rising irritation sharp as bile.

  "This is the first time you have come across this, this — halskette?" McBride was certain of a fervent hope in the question.

  "No, sir, it is not. I have maybe another dozen references to it, always by the same name, verbal and written. In files in America, and here in Germany. Maybe in England, too, though I haven't checked it out. But at second, third, fourth hand, I admit. You were there—"

  Menschler shifted in his chair. A parody of relaxation, yet McBride sensed the German had removed himself further from his guest, and from emotions that guest might initially have aroused. A thin cut of a smile on his face, giving the accusing lines of scar-tissue a more recent vivacity on his white face.

  "Ah, I am to be impressed by such notoriety as you imply in your tone, mm?" The thin smile broke the planes of his face again. "You suggest that I — tell all? — to you, you will create your sensationalizing book around it and make, no doubt, a great deal of money. Who will play my part in the film, Herr Professor McBride?" The blind man had perceived the ego lurking behind the mask of the bland, sober historian. Probably knew of Gates of Hell.

  "I am pursuing only the truth, Herr Menschler." It sounded palpably untrue, impossible, pompous. McBride wanted to laugh at himself, but Menschler did it for him, a sharp, barking sound, something long unused.

  "And the truth will make you rich, mm? I believe there is a vogue for such books at the moment. My daughters tell me so. They are very often surprised to discover that my tales to their children are not merely an old man's dreams. They are products of the Socialist wirtschaftwunder, of course. Who was Adolf Hitler? And so on." Menschler waved his arms, dismissing his descendants perhaps for generations to come, but not forever. McBride felt it was unfair for an ex-Nazi to be so perceptive about his world. Especially unfair in a man blinded by a shell fragment in the Chancellery grounds and who had exiled himself- probably on his state pension — from the post-war Germany.

  "And they show such films, such programmes — !" Menschler continued, his face entirely perspective lines towards the blind eyes. He was deeply angry. The hands polished the wooden arms of his chair in deep, massaging movements. "The filthy lies — these new Germans accept them, spit on the past as if it had nothing to do with them—"

  McBride was appalled. He was losing Menschler.

  "Very well, Herr Oberst. You wrote from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, from France, and from Belgium to Alfred von Kass during the second half of 1940. What were you doing in the support planning staff after the postponement of Seelowe? McBride leaned forward in his chair towards the blind man, urging him to answer, wishing for a loose senility of tongue or an avarice that might take a fee as a bribe.

  "I was acting the part — rather well — of a German staff officer, Meinherr. That is what I was doing." McBride was incensed by the lordliness of the response, angry that the man was determined to retain secrets to which McBride felt he had some admissible rights of acquisition.

  "What was Emerald Necklace?" he almost shouted. "Was it Fall Smaragdenhalskette?" He felt hot and angry and blocked in that cold room. The man would see nothing, give nothing away—

  Menschler was smiling with superiority.

  "It was — nothing at all. As you admit, there are no records, Herr Professor, and no one will tell you. In fact, you will never prove that the halskette ever came out of the jeweller's window."

  "Why in God's name won't you talk about it?"

  "Why — why? Is there a right that you have to know?" Menschler seemed to know that McBride had risen from his chair, and had adjusted his head so that the blind pale eyes still looked into McBride's face.

  "Tell me, damn you, tell me!"

  "No. I choose to remain in the conspiracy of silence. My motives are not important, and they would not be understood by someone as — crass as you. One of my daughters tried to ask me questions about your book, Gates of Hell." Menschler held up his hands, and closed them into claws. "I tore the book to pieces, Herr McBride. You have dirty hands, and you will never touch the necklace with them. I choose not to tell you — and there is nothing you can do about that!"

  * * *

  The Rt Hon. David Guthrie, MP, HM Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had flown by helicopter from Stormont Castle to Alde
rgrove airport, then on an RAF flight to Northolt, and been driven into London by a Ministry driver. Now, in the office of Davidge the Home Secretary, preparing for an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister, Guthrie still looked at his ease, and to Davidge, as if he were appearing on television. Moving with the grace of an athlete or an actor, using his profile, marking off the room like his territory as he moved about it ot stood looking out over St James's Park in the autumnal mist that had persisted all morning. Though Davidge knew that the territory he really wished to appropriate was the office where they would lunch with the Premier.

  The press considered almost everything Guthrie did and said as a piece of canvassing for some future election, some anticipated occupation of 10 Downing Street — but the press was usually kind, and more than normally impressed by his term of office at Stormont, and the progress that had been made towards some kind of stability in Ulster. Davidge, as he watched the man he could not be like and could not, therefore, like or admire, sensed the electricity running between the reports on his desk and the man at the window.

  The Provisional IRA had detonated one hundred pounds of explosive at Aldershot, and a lot of soldiers and their families were dead and injured. And a second bomb had been defused at Catterick. In the wake of bombs in Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Southampton. A summer of mainland bombing had badly frightened people. Had threatened the Anglo-Irish Agreement almost as seriously as did the new government in Dublin. Yet Guthrie appeared at ease.

  For Davidge, to whom the same school, the identical university and a parallel political career had not given the same ease before the cameras or the same overriding self-assuredness, Guthrie was habitually an irritant. He was still the man's fag, after all the years that had passed.