by Craig Thomas
CHAPTER THREE
Unpolished Gems
November 1940
The light on the breakwater, the South Ship Channel, the bulk of Portland Castle were ahead as the submarine altered course, the lights of Fortuneswell flickering before people remembered the black-out; dusk advancing over the island. McBride saw it from the conning-tower of the submarine, standing alongside the young Lt Commander, dressed in a borrowed duffel-coat. Overhead, the two Hurricanes who had provided escort droned away towards Weymouth, mission accomplished. The destroyer which had rendezvoused with the submarine at dawn when it began its ten-knot surface-run across the Channel, was a slim, knife-like shape behind them, having preceded the submarine with an asdic sweep until they were only a couple of miles from Portland. McBride felt drained, and reluctant, even though the view of Portland harbour was familiar, even comforting. He had felt little of the tension, the strain, of finally slipping away from Guernsey underwater, or of the silent routine, the submarine resting on the bottom outside the cove during the remainder of the night. His tension had been of a different kind, leaning forward like a sick man, whispering out his initial debriefing report that had occupied most of the night — coming out of what seemed like a light, self-induced trance at the distant occasional concussions of depth-charges. As soon as he had settled in the captain's cramped, neat cabin, the curtain drawn between it and the companion-way, he had begun to respond to the quiet, teasing, unceasing questions of the lieutenant RNVR — commissioned at the outbreak of hostilities from civilian intelligence — which had seemed to fall on his awareness like a constant, defeating drip of water. The lieutenant was little more than an amanuensis, taking a shorthand account of everything McBride had done, seen, thought during the hours he had been on Guernsey before he could forget, or ignore, or arrange the material according to his own speculations. The professional agent had made no comment, offered no speculation. The submarine had surfaced, after coming to periscope depth, and given the captain the relief of a choppy, empty sea, and then begun its run of sixty-odd miles for Portland.
The submarine docked alongside the fat bulk of a depot ship, suddenly cramped and made insignificant. McBride, looking down at the jetty from the conning-tower, could see the two figures waiting for him. Then the lieutenant joined him next to the submarine's captain. McBride shook hands with the captain.
"Thanks."
"Almost a pleasure." The submariner tossed his head towards the jetty. "Have fun."
"Are you ready, Commander?" the professional asked, not so much in impatience as with due attention to time and required expertise. McBride nodded, rubbed his face as if massaging it, and took off the duffel-coat. "I'll go down and check the arrangements." The lieutenant climbed over the side and down the ladder.
"I'm glad to say not all RNVR chaps are like him," the young Lt Commander observed after the head had disappeared. "Cold fish, I should think?"
"Professional," McBride observed.
"And you're an amateur?"
"Sure I am," McBride replied in the broadest brogue he could summon. "Thanks again."
He climbed lightly over the side of the conning-tower, and down the ladder. He jumped the narrow space of oily water onto the jetty. One of his reception party, almost to his surprise, was a Wren — his driver, he presumed. He grinned at her, but she ignored him. The Commander, RN, of NOIC staff, Portland, seemed to expect him to salute, then appeared to lump him with the lieutenant as a professional agent to whom naval discipline was an unreality.
"Shall we go?" he asked.
"Where's Walsingham?" McBride asked, suddenly not wishing to clamber into a car and sit out some unlit night drive along the south coast.
The commander seemed to sense his reluctance at once, and said with a smirk: "You haven't anything against women drivers, have you, McBride?"
McBride felt suddenly irritated, unreasonably so. He supposed it to be the aftershock of his escape, or simply his weariness.
"Where the hell is Walsingham? I want this debriefing over so I can sleep!"
"Walsingham's at the Otterbourne house — you're being taken there."
McBride raised his hands, as if to wring them in protest and frustration, then he seemed to subside, grinned tiredly, and merely said, "Very well, your honours, let's get on with it, shall we?"
The noises of the submarine releasing its crew behind them seemed safe and familiar to McBride as they walked to the Austin at the end of the jetty. A jeep was parked behind it, with an MP sergeant leaning on it, and a driver and two more MPs inside. Armed escort. After Guernsey, it all seemed piffling and unnecessary to McBride.
"The prisoner leaps to loose his chains—" he sang softly. The Wren, standing next to him, looked up into his face and smiled.
They left the commander standing watching their departure, McBride and the lieutenant in the back seat of the Austin, the jeep ahead of them, and turned out past the depot and along the short stretch of Chesil Beach to Ferry Bridge and the outskirts of Weymouth. The intelligence officer seemed disinclined to converse, as if his task were accomplished. McBride surrendered to the expertise of the driver as she tailed the jeep. He tried to sleep, dozing off occasionally, waking often and catching the moonlight glinting like steel on Weymouth Bay, the trees along the A352 like sentries, the snail-like progress through blacked-out Poole and Bournemouth, the darkness-moonlight alternations of the New Forest, the stop-start and sense of a bigger, more frightened town as they passed through Southampton.
And came awake at the burning, the smell of it in the car and the light playing disturbingly on his closed eyelids. There had been another raid on the port. The Wren had to thread her way behind the jeep through undamaged side-streets to the north of the city centre, which seemed a chain of fires linked by darkness. There were fires, too, down in the dock area. McBride, half awake, saw them from a seaward vantage, Southampton Water reflecting the glare down as far as Hamble and beyond.
The car jolted over fire-hoses, paused at hastily erected barriers — McBride saw in the light of a fire begun by a stray bomb a bath hanging crazily out of the torn side of a house — and moved slowly on until they turned onto the main Winchester road. As if he had felt obliged to witness the damage to Southampton, he now slid down in the seat again, and began to let the thoughts of his village, Leap, and the cottage and his wife, Maureen, repossess his dreaming. There had been something stinging and salutary about Southampton, diminishing his own previous night on the run in Guernsey. It was no great matter beside the dead and burned in the seaport behind them. Reflected firelight still shimmered just above his head on the roof-lining.
Whenever he finished a job, there was time for the slowness of Ireland, for the cottage, for his wife and the gleam of moonlight on the ceiling of their bedroom and the frame of the brass bedstead; and the water jug which was frozen over on winter mornings. He settled to the work of memory, hardly noticing as they turned off the A33 just south of Otterbourne, entered lodge-gates, and passed down a drive lined with oaks, finally drawing up before a small eighteenth-century country house which seemed to disdain the modern encroachment of a guard-hut on its gravel drive.
The Wren parked the car, and McBride was shaken awake by his companion. He groaned, stretching and feeling stiffer than he had done between the coal-bunkers or the rocks. Maureen slipped away from him, smiling, and he felt intense irritation with his companion. He climbed out of the car, nodded to the occupants of the jeep who were already at ease and smoking, then saw Walsingham on the steps of the house, waiting for him.
He consciously prodded himself forward, wanting nothing more than to return to sleep.
* * *
Lieutenant Peter Gilliatt, RNVR first officer of HMS Bisley, hefted his grey hold-all down from the carriage and over his shoulder. He had got as far as Cardiff, and the variety show at the New Theatre and then a pub called The Moulder's Arms where some of the female customers had inspired anxiety rather than desire — before the local police
had caught up with him. He had put aside the thin, warm Welsh bitter almost gratefully, surprised more that the PC had found him than by the order to return immediately to Milford Haven and his ship.
But it had been relatively easy for the police, he had decided during the slow, late-night train journey through south and south-west Wales into empty, unbombed Pembrokeshire. He always went as far as Cardiff on his forty-eights, preferring it to Swansea, he always went to a show or the flicks, and he always got half-tight in one of half a dozen pubs at the back of Queen Street. One day he would change his routine, and they wouldn't find him.
Some of his crew had been on the train, all noisy and most of them angry; reluctant to believe that he was as ignorant as they as to the reason behind the summons back to the minesweeping flotilla. Gilliatt, amusedly considering that an officer's pleasures were less vivid than those of his men, had no great sense of being cheated out of leave, and therefore no great expectation of dire necessity attached to their sailing orders. The Jerries had probably sewn a new net of mines in the Bristol Channel or outside Swansea harbour either by minelayer or aircraft — nothing more or less than routine.
Milford Haven station was in complete darkness, and Gilliatt let his crew members roll and grouch ahead of him down the wet platform, curse their mislaid tickets and their officers, then go out into the light, soaking rain to find their way down to the docks. The ticket collector saluted as he took Gilliatt's ticket, and Gilliatt touched his cap. The Moulder's Arms and the other back-street pubs in Cardiff were no great loss. He liked being at sea — which was why he had resigned from the navy in "37, fed up with Naval Intelligence and a desk-bound life. And why he'd re-enlisted, in the RNVR, as soon as Hitler invaded Poland. He'd been quite well aware that there would be a war in Europe when he resigned, and he'd known he'd be trapped in Intelligence unless he temporarily broke his career ties with the Royal Navy.
He carried with him the constant satisfaction of having outwitted the Admiralty. Their Lordships had decided, it seemed, that his university background and his facility in French and German shaped him for only one role in the navy — in Intelligence. With the first hints of the reorganization of Admiralty Intelligence to prepare for another war, Gilliatt had gone to work for a small boat-builder in Appkdore until September 1939.
He was a happy man as he passed through the dusty-smelling booking hall of the station, his shoes clicking on the wooden floor, and out into the soft Pembrokeshire rain, insinuating and persistent. Pulling up his collar, he set off in the wake of Campbell, Howard and the others he had recognized. As he walked down the hill from the station, past the NOIC HQ and the Lord Nelson pub, he could see, through the rain, the harbour and bay laid out before him, across to the mouth of Angle Bay. Escort ships ready to fuss over their charges, and another convoy building up. Cardiff — and the less immediate past — faded behind him; he was a shallower, more contented man.
* * *
A D-class cruiser emerged from the wet, murky curtain of rain, a light high up on her superstructure the only spot of colour in the greyness. From the vantage point of one of the three British merchant ships, there was something piled and slabbed and sinister about the cruiser's bulk; and something worn, and tired — an air of making do, of potential defeat. The greeting in the signal-lamp's message was hollow, almost threatening. The American cruiser had already vanished back into the rainy mist, heading for the neutrality of Roosevelt's America.
They were fifty miles east of St John's, Newfoundland, sailing from Halifax, with two thousand miles of the North Atlantic between them and the Clyde or the Mersey. On leave in New York, before they sailed, the strangeness of a country not at war had seemed welcome, shallow, and even something to be despised. Women well-dressed, arms full of packages from early Christmas shopping at Macy's; taxis to be had by raising an arm; Manhattan garish and alive with light when darkness fell; the skies quiet. Now, as the British cruiser — their sole escort — emerged from behind the weather, heaving with the effort, it seemed, it brought with it the smell of war, of Europe.
The cruiser signalled each of the three twenty-thousand-ton merchant ships in turn. There would be complete radio silence except in the utmost emergency. All communication was to be by means of signal-lamp, as it had been with the American cruiser.
America was now impossibly distant, infinitely desirable, and incapable of being disdainfully looked down upon, veteran upon rookie. Between them and their destination, as they zig-zagged their way across the Atlantic, were the U-boats. Their imagined presence was more potent than the grey, unsubstantial bulk of the cruiser.
The cargo — grain, machine-parts, aircraft spares — was no longer important, nothing more than a futile gesture of help by the Americans, and a single drop in a bottomless bucket to the British. And the idea of it being a trial-run for new convoy tactics seemed now only the unenviable prerogative of the guinea-pig. Some of them knew the figures for shipping losses the previous month — 103 ships, 443,000 tons. Britain was, being starved to death. And that did not seem to matter so much now as the garish safe lights on Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the coffee-shops, bars, restaurants where they were a strange and welcome species.
October 198-
McBride had agreed that Goessler should be paid the equivalent of five per cent of the advances and royalties of the book, when it was written — Swiss account, dollars or Swiss francs did not matter. McBride was gratified in discovering Goessler's motive for helpfulness, and accepted the demand without question. He was paying no one else, and the agreement was unwritten and conditional on the discovery of some striking and convincing new material.
It took the four students that Goessler had subverted temporarily from their postgraduate work two days to assemble a slim folder of evidence for the existence of Emerald Necklace. Goessler had only occasionally appeared in the room off the main university library that he had caused to be set aside for the work, like a nanny periodically checking upon her charges. He claimed — to McBride's anxious anticipation — to be tracking down some of the names that had been thrown up by the documentary material they unearthed. Five per cent had galvanized Goessler — he seemed slimmer, less jolly, sleeker of mind. McBride enjoyed the cupidity displayed by the East German Marxist academic. It made him feel more justified in despising those American professors guest-reviewing Gates of Hell as a bad, badly-written book.
McBride handled the collected documents with a reverent delicacy, and returned to them compulsively again and again — reading the German slowly, caressingly, and with a catch-breath anticipation that he might have misread, mistranslated, read into.
As the girl student, Marthe, brought his coffee in a lumpy brown earthenware mug, and he nodded his thanks, he was reading the movement orders of two infantry divisions, dated late in October 1940. The two divisions, XXXII and XLV, had not been stood down when Seelowe was canceled by the Führer — except very temporarily. A leave-pass record had survived with the movement order, and there had been little leave — unlike other divisions in France initially required for Seelowe — after the cancellation. A number of senior officers had been summoned to Berlin — regimental and abteilungen commanders — but for junior officers and other ranks only compassionate leave. After a very brief bivouac in the Cherbburg area they had been transferred to Brittany, to the Plabennec-St Renan area north of Brest. Here, they were to establish a temporary headquarters. The temporary nature of their headquarters was attested to by the surviving requisitions of building materials and billets.
In the same fortnight after the cancellation of Seelowe — Sea Lion — on October 12th, certain units of the XIV Panzer Division, the division's Panzergrenadier Brigade and the Panzeraufklarungsabteilung — the armoured reconnaissance unit — had also been moved from Holland to the Brest area of Brittany. Lastly, the recce company, the three parachute rifle regiments, and the engineer-signal units of a Fallschirmjaeger — Parachute — Division had been detached from their headquarters in Poland
and been reassigned to guarding certain airfields in northern France on behalf of the Luftwaffe. Such a wasteful employment of highly-trained, elite troops that McBride had lumped it with the other evidence.
What he had gathered was sufficient proof that a small, highly mobile invasion force had been assembled in Brittany during late October, 1940. Smaragdenhalskette was a reality in terms of the deployment of units.
It remained without a target, an objective.
This was not something that disappointed McBride. Just as he accepted that what lay now under his hand had come spilling out of dusty files when required, so it would go on. He knew that somehow he was meant to find the documents relating to Emerald Necklace, and that it would all be in his book, and that the book would be a big one. One slight regret — he would have liked an eye-witness, or more than one.
He sipped at his coffee, the warm liquid spreading like the warmth of self-satisfaction in his stomach. Goessler, when he popped his head round the door of the room, found McBride still studying the documents as if they were already fine-print contracts, and sipping at his coffee.
"Herr Professor McBride—" Goessler seemed so much more bumbling at moments, yet so much sharper at others now that he was in on the money side, that McBride wondered what kind of mind kept slipping in and out of focus behind the rubicund, smiling face. "Working on the unit designations—" He sat down beside McBride, hand on the younger man's arm immediately in a conspiratorial gesture, voice lowered. For five per cent, Goessler was apparently only too willing to subordinate himself to McBride. McBride nodded, amused. "I have so far traced one man living in Berlin here who was with XLV Division in France during the — critical time."
"You're sure of this?" McBride smiled, saw a moment of calculation in Goessler's eyes, dismissed it, and added: "Can I meet him?"