by Craig Thomas
"What is the PM's feeling?" Guthrie asked finally, a look of frank distaste souring his features. As if he had spotted a weakness within himself which the words embodied.
"Distress — I think one may use the word unreservedly."
Guthrie turned to face Davidge as he sat at his desk.
"Two bombs in Dublin, another in Waterford," he snapped, as if he were the intended victim. "Fires all over Belfast and Derry. Those bastards are worried, Davidge — really worried!"
"But will they succeed, Guthrie — that is what you will be asked this afternoon — can they succeed?"
"In persuading the Dublin government to withdraw from the Anglo-Irish Agreement, you mean?"
"What else? That, I take it, is the object?"
"I should presume so." Guthrie rubbed his chin, and stared across the low mist shrouding the park. It looked cold out there; figures moved through the mist as little more than dancing spots tiredness might have brought to his eyes. He'd seen the growing apprehension on the faces of his PPS, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Even the GOC's staff were apprehensive, and felt unfairly restrained in a low-profile response which Guthrie hoped might keep the Dublin government as signatories to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Hadn't that been the real object of the summer's bombing campaign on the mainland? And of Provisional Sinn Fein's hysterical propaganda war? The election in July had changed the Dublin government. Fianna Fail might be persuaded, if sufficient pressure could be applied, to renege on the Agreement and adopt its traditional cry for a united Ireland. Stop all cross-border co-operation on security, stop working for a political solution. Then the cycle of violence would begin once more in even greater earnest.
He could stop it — could still prevent it. If the meetings to which he had invited the Irish Prime Minister took place, and were successful, they could reaffirm the accord between London and Dublin. If, if, if…
Clearing his throat softly, Guthrie announced: "The Unionists — of most shades — have agreed to hold back. They're not prepared to be seen to be giving way, but their opposition has dwindled. They haven't been able to destroy the Agreement, and they know it…" More urgently, as if he sensed he had failed to convince even himself, he continued: "If I can persuade Dublin to honour the Agreement…" He turned to the Home Secretary, one hand before him in an upturned fist. "We can still do it, Roger — we can hold the middle ground. That's why the Proves are lashing out now, why this is their last, desperate effort. If Dublin stays with us now, with a Fianna Fail government, then they're in trouble. All the men of violence are in trouble." He moved closer to Davidge, his eyes clear, gleaming. More softly, but still with urgency, he said: "You have to begin making arrests, Roger. We have to have these bombers — now. To maintain our credibility. Ever since Brighton almost succeeded, we've been waiting for another campaign. I may not be able to convince Dublin that the Agreement's worth tuppence if we can't locate a bombing team in our own back yard!" Once more, his hand closed into a fist. "They're blowing the cement out of the brickwork, Roger. It mustn't happen — not now!"
November 1940
It was raining, and there was a wind sweeping across Guernsey which spattered the hard drops against one side of his face. The left side, which was now almost dead to any feeling, ached with awakened blood vessels whenever he rubbed it. Minor discomfort. He was far more concerned with the duration of the shower. It was already after dark, and after curfew.
Yet there was the same elation, familiar rather than self-betraying. They had told him, years ago when Drummond had first recruited him, that a lot of the work was sheer and unadulterated boredom. A pain in the backside, one senior instructor had drawled, dismissing espionage much as he might have done other people's boils. Michael McBride — currently Lt Commander McBride, RN — had wondered at the virginal excitements of training, at the persistence of such feelings during early operations immediately prior to the war, and then grown accustomed and accepting. Apparently — he smiled even now as he formed the thought — he was made to be an agent. He had found his metier, his vocation.
He stopped, pumping his hands against his arms, flapping himself warm. He took out the pencil torch, flicked on the thin beam for a second, and nodded. He was half a mile outside St Peter Port, on the main road from St Sampson and the cove north of Clos-du-Valle where the submarine had landed him. The S-class submarine could not navigate between Herm and Guernsey in safety — could have brought him no further south and nearer St Peter Port. He was making reasonable time, but he was impatient to arrive in St Peter Port, as a lover would be for a rendezvous.
He could not be certain of the currency of his forged papers, which were designed to get him down to the main harbour itself — certainly through and past the patrols in the town. He had been ordered to go nowhere near any of the contacts among the occupied islanders — Admiralty Operational Intelligence Centre had made that the strictest parameter of his job. He was not to be known to be on Guernsey. Even at the risk of the papers he carried being days, even hours, out of date.
He crossed the coast road, looked down over Belle Greve Bay briefly, taking in the new ugly groynes, the barbed wire rolls along the strip of deserted beach, the tilted signposts, the empty beach huts falling into disrepair almost in a single glance. He'd been to Guernsey before on minor jobs — nothing like this one, from the tight-lipped briefing and the solemn faces that made him want to smile — but this landscape of fear and occupation was deja vu simply because it was a scenery natural to him and his unusual occupation. Curtains blacked out the windows and lights of the newish retirement bungalows that straggled out along Les Banques from the old town in an effort to ribbon-develop St Peter Port and St Sampson. Some of them were empty, and some — he moved back across the road as he let in the thought — were used to billet Wehrmacht officers of the forces of occupation. And he must get on — it was strictly a one-night-stand, my darling. He began moving more quickly along the road. It was coming on to rain harder, and he ceased to worry now he was engaged in movement, moving too quickly for slow German minds and slower hierarchy of action.
Ten minutes later, he halted once more. At the crossroad ahead, there was a German patrol, and a couple of arc lamps. Pub, tram sheds, bus garage. He could see the street plan of St Peter Port with vivid clarity, almost perceive his own route as a dotted line traced on it — much more clearly than the muzzy aerial pictures that had sent him here. Long low sheds erected in the strongly-fortified Albert Marina, intended to conceal as well as protect. Like submarine pens, the briefing officer had observed unnecessarily.
He worked his way behind the pub, where thin edges of light framed the blacked-out windows, paused to listen to the noises of a German song, tossed his head in amusement and in the superiority of moving secretively past, crossed Grand Bouet in a long-striding spring, and ducked down in the shelter of a hedge. Moving through a changed but still somehow pre-war suburbia on a holiday island. The bus garage was patrolled, but minimally.
He kept to the shadows of the buildings, listening with satisfaction to the silence of his passage. He climbed a rickety fence out onto First Tower Lane, took a fenced, grassy lane through to the Rue du Commerce, and rejoined Les Banques, now the esplanade.
Anti-aircraft guns pointed north, sandbagged against the sea-wall, incongruous opposite the boarding-houses which were mostly now billets. He began to walk openly, hands in pockets, humming softly. Dock worker, curfew permit and ID card in his breast-pocket, walking to join the night shift. He passed the first AA emplacement, and nobody took any notice. Coarse Berliner dance-band music floated occasionally to him on the wind. He skipped in time to it once or twice, because he was enjoying himself and the small part of his personal life which his pregnant wife occupied was dormant for the duration of any job they sent him on.
Along St George's Esplanade — he recited the names on the pre-war map, aware of the imposed German names, feeling the excitement curling like a drink in his stomach, or a cat contented to be warm
and asking no more. The AA emplacement on the Salerie was betraying light, and the smell of cooking. Something with onions. A truck with a canvas hood was parked alongside the sandbags and the hut. Someone laughed, and he heard in a side-street a bus cough into life. Workmen's bus, heading for the harbour, then he was on Glategny Esplanade running along the north beach.
There was a barrier and guards at the crossroads. Other workmen by this time, and the checking of papers more perfunctory, as he had expected. He would have been more interesting to the patrol near the pub, coming from outside the town. Now, he was part of the nightly traffic to the harbour, and he joined the little queue of islanders and Frenchmen who had descended from a bus. Inevitably, someone spat in the brave darkness after a guard had passed, machine-pistol slung at the ready, boots splashing in the rain. McBride watched the men in front of him, and the manner in which their papers were checked by the officer in the Kriegsmarine greatcoat and the "Security" tabs at collar and armband, and felt an intenser excitement. The guards were from no special unit, but they were alert, bristling with guns and purpose — the kind of charade McBride knew was habitual and which replaced real security when it passed into uneventful routine. The body-searches on the way off-shift would be thorough, but he would take nothing away.
He came level with the officer, adopted a careless, indifferent silence, and his papers were passed immediately. He had not even considered that they might be spotted as fakes, or betray him by an error. Some other part of the organism had shifted him half a yard closer to the nearest soldier, taken in his youth, his build, and the ease with which the machine-pistol would come away from his hands. McBride did things for his own survival without caring, with a thorough instinct.
He was waved through the barrier, which swung aside, and kept a couple of steps behind the two men in front of him down the North Esplanade, past the Victoria Marina, then through another barrier onto the Albert Pier. Here, there were more guards — the tabs of a special security unit clear in the white arc lights, the Kriegsmarine officers more numerous, the check more thorough, longer. He passed through, and dismissed the tension that had knotted suddenly in his stomach. The long, low sheds were ahead of him, each one marking a berth or berths. Closed doors, noises from within, lights slitting beneath doors, bursting from cracked windows or torn black-outs. Fuzzy aerial pictures.
He looked around him, slowing his pace so that the men ahead of him increased their distance. The man behind him was catching up. McBride slipped on the wet concrete, cursed in French, and rubbed his ankle under his boot.
"Hurt?" the man enquired as he drew level. McBride shook his head, swore and blamed the Germans for the weather, and the man walked on, laughing. McBride looked back at the barrier, lights fuzzy in the rain, and then slipped into the shadow of a warehouse. The sheds were fifty yards from him. He watched as a judas-door opened to admit the men who had been in front of him — the clatter of repair, bright leap of welding sparks, then the door closed. There was an armed guard there, too. McBride rubbed his hands, not entirely to keep warm, and began to wait.
* * *
Three in the morning. He was stiff with cold, and the single draught of rum had traced a slow, leaky passage like warm snow down his gullet, dissipated and might never have been. He had concealed himself between two of the coal-bunkers near the warehouse, at the end of the narrow-gauge track for the steam-crane which unloaded the coal Guernsey still imported for coal-burning coastal vessels. Like switched-off machinery, he had waited. Now, in the tired small hours, it was time to move. The cold was stiffening, annoying, but bearable because it was one of the conditions of the job, like his false papers and the swift row on the incoming rough tide from the slippery deck of the submarine. He was wearing three thick sweaters, long Johns, two pairs of trousers — what did he expect?
He stamped his feet, slapped his arms, shuffled and blew, then moved along the wall of the warehouse — once hearing a rat scurry on the other side of the corrugated iron as he paused. The rain was falling almost vertically since the wind had dropped as he carefully emerged onto the pier again. He studied the terrain like an animal, then ran. His boots began what seemed a hideous noise, his breath roared in his ears as if he were unfit and exhausted, then he was in the shadow of the first low shed — a hundred and fifty yards long, he estimated. The noises of repair and service dinned through the corrugated wall as he pressed his cheek against it. Vibration quivered. He paused only for a moment. He had selected the window he wanted, and moved swiftly. He had declared his presence — a line of bootprints in the mud from warehouse to shed — to any patrol. They moved around the pier frequently, but he expected laxity this late in the night. He had perhaps fifteen minutes.
He moved along the side of the shed. The windows were high up near the sloping edge of the roof, for ventilation more than light. Pricks of light came from most of them. The ladder was at the seaward end of the shed.
He climbed quickly and silently, up into the wind that had changed its mind and sprung back. The handholds were icily wet. He paused at the top, surveyed the area around him. Guards tended to huddle round fires in huts, but he wanted to be certain. Nothing moving. He eased himself onto the roof, and moved in a waddling crouch along its edge. It took him whole minutes to reach the window he had selected, but he did not slip once, holding his feet as he moved them against the bolts that fixed the roof to the walls, resting his heels in the corrugations. His thighs and the backs of his legs ached when he reached his goal. Here, he tested the roofs edge, and the guttering, took firm hold with his now unmittened hands, the cold of the iron a shock that ran in a shudder through his system — then lowered his body over the edge of the roof so that he hung against the window, the weight of clothing and boots sudden and painful in his shoulders and arms.
The tear in the black-out cloth was thin, and long. He shuffled his handhold until he could lean in against the dirty glass, and see—
The submarine being worked on almost directly below him was a bloody mess, there was no doubt about that; only amazement that it had limped back for repairs. Most of the crewmen in the forward section of the hull must have died, or been badly torn up. The bow bulged open like a crusted sore, and the deck-plates had been shuffled like untidy cards. McBride estimated that the sub had lost ten or twelve feet of its bow. Internal explosion? Torpedo? Mine? Depth charge?
A big U-boat, and another beyond it, being checked over for plate-wear, hull-strain. Two of the biggest class of German U-boat, men hurrying about them. If each shed contained even one, then there was a pack of ten here — on Guernsey? These were submarine pens, but not like La Rochelle, Brest and St Nazaire and the rest of the Normandy and Brittany pens — no concrete, no massive servicing back-up, no — permanence — ? It had taken the Germans no more than a couple of days to throw up the corrugated sheds — which could only be for concealment, then.
These boats were either 'milchcow" refuelling subs, or they were long-trip, ocean-going boats, designed to bite the jugular where it was exposed, far out in the Atlantic — not around the North Channel where the convoys turned for the Mersey and the Clyde. Why here? For God's sake, he told himself sternly, as if lecturing the general staff of the Kriegsmarine, it's like keeping old silver in a pillow-case under the bed. He smiled, shifted to test the weariness of his arms, then continued his surveillance. His hands were beginning to go dead.
The damaged submarine in front of him carried no deck-gun. He could not see a single torpedo-trolley, not even the necessary hoists to lower the torpedoes on board. They were going out unarmed? His arms weakened with the shock, he felt as if struck. The mysteriousness of what he had found assailed him like a punch that simply went on happening, almost for a minute. He could find no answer, and his ignorance was like an impotence. What else, what else? he prompted himself. Concentrate.
At the stern of the submarine — and the one beyond it — he saw the strange, out-of-place pillars, curved and jointed like insect mandibles. The men
working at the bow of the undamaged boat were erecting stanchions, and he assumed that the missing bow-section of the other sub had borne a similar, inexplicable mounting.
There was nothing else, nothing he could take in as clearly as before. Fact had been deadened by speculation. He was wasting his time now, it might come back later, just as if he had caught it on film, when he was debriefed. Once the resolve had gone, it was hard to hang on for sufficient time to take in the scene once more, repressing the selectivity of speculation. He wondered whether he could haul himself up with the frozen hands and aching arms.
One thing more — his angle of vision had precluded sight of them before, but now they moved nearer the stern of the damaged sub, as if to inspect the mountings. Two senior officers — one wearing a Wehrmacht greatcoat, the other in naval uniform. His weariness, the aching muscles in his arms, seemed to go away to a great distance. He was a spectator of some adult drama he could not comprehend. There was a familiarity, a common cause between the two senior officers, so unlike the Intelligence proclamations of intense and unceasing rivalry between the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine; all the way up to the General Staff and the Führer. What in hell were they doing?
Their conversation went on for minutes, then the two men shook hands, there was much self-congratulation, and, as they walked out of his view, he groaned with the return of awareness to his arms and shoulders. He didn't think he could pull himself back up—
The voice from below him settled the matter. "You — drop to the ground, at once!" McBride did not look down, nor did he pretend not to understand German.
October 198-
Thomas Sean McBride parked the mud-stained Audi in the hotel car park, collected his room key and mail from the stiffly-polite clerk, whose words he brushed off as if they came between him and the indulgence of his weary disappointment, then took the lift to his third-floor room with its view across the Moselstrasse to the river and the suburb of Lutzel on the opposite bank.