by Craig Thomas
Gilliatt moved to the starboard guard-rail, watching the two floats, his eyes flickering between them like those of a tennis spectator. His hands gripped the rail unnoticed. He knew they must now be clear of their own swept area. No mines rolled with the swell, bobbing up to the surface. A watery sunlight which hurt the eyes less than the cloud-cover had done gleamed weakly off the water. He saw Knap Hill, now leading the flotilla, flash a signal to them.
"God be with you."
And Fraser's Scottish Presbyterianism no longer seemed overdone or antiquated but moving instead — and forbidding. He wondered whether Ashe would return his habitual signal: "The Devil looks after his own." He didn't think so. Gilliatt turned his attention to the bridge, and smiled as he read the reply. Ashe must have recovered something of his confidence.
"May the Lord lighten our darkness and unfold His mystery."
When he had sent his reply, Ashe returned to his chair, and sat unmoving, minute after minute, making the bridge an electric, charged, cramped space where the pilot, the yeoman and the officer of the watch fidgeted, coughed, shuffled to dispel the mood he created. The humorous reply to Knap Hill's captain, Fraser, seemed to have drained some last reserve of pretence or resolution from Ashe. The pilot, as he tracked their progress through what should have been a minefield, willed Ashe to look at the chart. It was a channel, it was—
Ashe continued to sit, carved or petrified by his own knowledge. The silence beyond the bridge deafened them.
They all knew it, Cobner thought, there was no need to go on. Gilliatt down on the sweep deck would know it, the sea empty of cut mines, the coxswain would know it, subby knew, the yeoman — the men on deck, shuffled for" ard of the sweep deck like a transported herd. Come on, man, come on—
And then Ashe was at his shoulder, staring at the chart. Cobner's finger rested on their position. Ashe breathed in deeply, once, then crossed to the voice pipe.
"Cox" n, reduce revolutions." Then, galvanized, he was at the bridge telephone. "Number One, stand by to take in sweeps — in sweeps!" He paused, then: "Report to my cabin on completion, Number One." He turned to Cobner, eager now to escape the bridge, as if a stranger himself to the atmosphere he had created and not yet dispelled. "Take over, Pilot. Steam north again on 020 until we're heading east again, inform me and we can relax ship's company a little." The brief smile that he tried to fit to his mouth when he had finished speaking did not seem viable and he abandoned it.
As he went below, Ashe could think of nothing else, feeling the realizations engulfing him like a wave of sickness. It was a German-swept channel, running from the edge of the minefield to the coast of Ireland, and it meant only one thing—
Invasion.
The Germans were going to invade Ireland.
PART TWO
Smaragdenhalskette
CHAPTER SIX
The Combatants
November 1940
McBride, suddenly aware of every corner and shadow of the single living-room of Rourke's cottage, was assailed not by a perception of his own danger, but a complete and entire sense of the links which bound together the German outside, the dead Rourke, the beaten-up thug in Clonakilty, Devlin, and Maureen. He felt her danger, and was as impotent against it as if he were tied in a chair and the German agent on his way to silence her.
The flames from the burning motorbike he had left down the track to the cottage flickered on the wallpaper, and he dismissed the sensation of threat to his wife. There was only the reality of the man outside and the threat to himself.
He listened, and the room and the night outside it were silent. McBride steadied himself with one hand on the deal table, absorbing the solidity of its wood, the lines of knife-marks. And listened.
Nothing. He had to move. The last light from the motorbike was dying down. He had not memorized the contours of the room's poor furniture, and it was slipping back into darkness. He crossed to the door pausing, breath held, as he caressed a stool with his shin, felt it move almost imperceptibly, bent and stilled it before it scraped on the stone floor — then he opened the door very slowly, anticipating the protest of its hinges. Silence. He breathed out in a controlled, choked way, then stepped out into the short passage to the front door. He closed his eyes because he could see nothing, and listened again. But he could hear only the beginnings of the blood moving in his head, like the rustle of the sea in a shell. He opened his eyes again, knowing he dare not open the door. A silenced Luger would end it in a moment.
Upstairs. He placed his foot on the first of the narrow steps, let it take his weight, then raised his other foot. One at a time, very slowly, he moved up the short flight, resting his weight gently on every one, anticipating the betraying squeak. At the head of the stairs, he listened. One bedroom upstairs, and a storeroom. He listened, the German more omnipresent now in his imagination, more skilled and deadly with every passing minute in which he remained hidden.
Noise—?
A mouse scurrying somewhere, over his head, the swift patter of its paws loud in the continuing silence of the cottage. He smiled dismissively and with relief, though the noise persisted after the mouse had presumably vanished. Could he dismiss the noise?
He cocked his head, listening back down the stairs, beginning to wonder whether he had not made an error in retreating upstairs. He had done the obvious. He listened for a window, or a door; knowing all the time that the German was using his imagination as a litmus of fear, a catalysing agent. The longer he stayed outside, hidden and silent, the more he was to be feared, the more unnerved his opponent would become.
McBride could not help the tremor that was starting in his left leg, or the nerveless sensation which had begun in his fingertips.
The mouse moved again over his head, startling him, his breath loud and ragged. He pushed open the first of the two doors at the head of the stairs — it creaked, and he scrabbled to stop it, the creak loudening and going on like an uncontrollable yawn. He felt drawn to follow it, into the bedroom. He'd forgotten the creak of the bedroom door, and cursed himself for his error.
His nose was beginning to run with tension, he wanted to sniff and dare not. He began to fumble for his handkerchief, and the emptiness of his pockets — his unarmed state — as he searched for it, further unnerved him. Gun, knife he had used on Rourke, throat-wire, unarmed combat — which?
The German suddenly possessed a hundred ways of killing him, and McBride remembered the clumsy, half-beaten way he had fended off the thug in the yard behind the hotel, and the tremor in his leg became more pronounced.
He backed into a corner of the small bedroom, next to the window, an instinctive retreat. The darkness of the rainy, moonless night was almost complete, but gradually the vague shapes of the bed, the chest, the mirror echoing the paler square of the window next to him, the basin and jug, the now open door, emerged. He pressed his back against the wall, feeling the dampness of his fear down his spine, round the waistband of his trousers. He was growing cold, forcing himself to remain still, to listen.
The house was humming in his ears now, the silence gone on too long for him to hear anything quieter than a whisper. The German was patient, patient enough to reduce his opponent to impotence before he made a move.
Cold air flowed from the slightly open window, sliding across his hand with the solidity of liquid. He could hear nothing.
His hand got colder.
The window had been closed when he entered the bedroom, not just now, earlier when he had made his search—
No, now, when he entered the room.
Mouse-feet above his head.
The window slid noiselessly up. The German had prepared an escape-route, easing the window on his arrival. Now he was coming back in.
McBride saw the arms, in the same grey mackintosh from the hotel, the white hands, as the window was pulled very slowly, very gently, upwards.
His first reaction was to run. The German was lying on the roof, easing up the window. Then he would drop in
to the room—
McBride felt the room, the rest of the cottage, close as a bandage around his head, a thong drying out and pressing the brain. He wanted to get out, get away. The bottom half of the sash-window was up almost as much as it would go.
He stepped away from the wall, saw the arms and hands stiffen in surprise, sensed the German's face only a couple of feet above his own.
His left leg quivered uncontrollably.
Below the window there was a rising bank of grass behind the cottage and a heap of rotting straw becoming manure along with the kitchen peelings. He'd almost tripped into it on his search, before he found Rourke.
Microseconds. The hands moving gently, slowly and aquatically, away from the window. The cold air reaching his skin like lava, creeping. The metronome in his left leg at a different tempo—
One breath, then he jumped through the window, head protected by his hands, body flung outwards, turning over, feet coming down to be caught by the manure-heap, sucking him in, the pieces of the shattered window-frame landing beside him, banging painfully against his left arm, glass clinging in his hair and clothing and his hands, a voice swearing in German a long way off, his first stumbling footstep out of the manure, lurching forward so that he fell against the bank of wet grass with the momentum of the jump still moving him.
The click above him, the shift of a body, someone standing up as he rolled onto his back and saw a figure outlined against the almost black of the clouds. He rolled to one side, flame at the corner of one retina like a thin pencil-mark, the absorption of the bullet by the ground something that he could feel through the cheek which rested against the bank. Then he pushed himself upright and ran to the shelter of the angle of the cottage wall.
He wanted to do nothing but breathe in, but he choked off the desire for air, listening now to the unguarded movements on the roof. The German thought he was panicked, would move into the open at the front of the house, running away—
He heard the German moving over the angle of the roof, his foot scraping on the slates, one shirting slightly. McBride's leg was still, his hands firm, his heart racing but under control.
A slate fell down the sloping roof, snapped with a hideously loud noise on the paved path between the cottage and the outhouse. Then silence from the roof, and McBride fed on the guessed-at mood of the German, suddenly unnerved in his turn. And he did not know McBride was unarmed.
Minutes. Then the first movement, a quick stutter of footsteps across the now treacherous slates, the drop to the path on the other side of the house, and the silence again — all advantage canceled. The German knew he had not run, but lurked in the shadow of the cottage, as he now did himself.
And he had a gun.
Which way? He knew the direction of McBride's dash for cover, knew his approximate location.
Which way?
McBride eased silently around the cottage until he reached the front door. He paused, listening again, then opened the door quickly, banging it back against the passage wall, then slamming it shut again.
He retreated then as quickly as he could, back to the angle of the building.
He'd seen the German's outline. His threat was compacted into a frame of medium build dressed in a grey mackintosh. He was the man called "cousin Mike" in Clonakilty, nobody more than that.
He listened as the German came round the corner of the cottage towards the front door. He heard his footsteps pause, undecided, trying to assess the element of bluff. He was less than ten feet away — nearer seven, maybe eight at most. The cottage shrank — it was three paces from McBride to the German.
Open the door, open it—
He had to look now.
The German, boot raised to kick open the door — as McBride had hoped, off-balance and gun on the far side in his right hand. McBride launched himself as the German kicked open the cottage door and regained his balance. He caught the German in a tackle, wrapping his arms around the man, reaching with his hands for the gun. The German tried to tear free as they fell to the ground — the gun fired, then again, and again, deafening McBride, before he could get his hands on it.
The German pulled his right arm free of the tackle, tried to roll over, attempted to strike McBride across the face with his left forearm. McBride shifted his concentration to the German's face, hit down with his fist and made contact, knuckles against bared teeth, so that he knew there was no power, no effect. The German heaved up at him, turning his body, and McBride felt himself rolling off the German. He raised his body, struck again across the German's face with his forearm, immediately groping in the darkness for the hand that held the gun. His hearing was returning, he could hear his own breath and that of the German, roaring as they struggled on the wet ground.
A blow across the side of his head stunned him, but he reached up, his hand sliding across the smear of blood, and grabbed the gun barrel. He wrenched down, then away, hurting the German, freeing the gun. The German threw the rest of his weight off him, and got to his feet, reckless with the knowledge that McBride had the gun, secure in that he would be unlikely to kill, needing to interrogate him.
McBride wiped at his eyes with his left hand, fumbled the gun around with his right. When he could see again, there was the noise of heavy running footsteps. He fired off two hopeful shots in their direction as he knelt by the front door of the cottage, the blood seeping into his left eye again from the cut across his forehead. The footsteps diminished with distance, with undiminished pace. The German had got away.
McBride rubbed at the trickling blood again, cursing.
* * *
HMS Bisley was signalled to anchor off Milford Haven, and her crew, with the exception of the captain and first lieutenant, were to remain aboard. Gilliatt and Ashe went ashore in the minesweeper's motorboat, the grey water choppy across the half-mile to the dock-side. Gilliatt was huddled in his duffel-coat, hood pulled over his cap, arms thrust down into the deep pockets. He felt peculiarly uneasy, almost disorientated, like some prisoner being transported from one confinement to another. It was a localized feeling, one he sensed he had deliberately though subconsciously induced. It alleviated the pressure of Ashe's presence, his mood of inward shrinking. Ashe had the Admiralty plague of looming defeat, picked up in Whitehall. And Gilliatt knew that was where he was to proceed.
On the jetty waiting for them, impatient to help them from the motorboat, anxious and desperate to hear their expansion of the one brief coded message they had radioed to Milford, were two commanders from NOIC's HQ at Milford, Western Approaches Command, together with a captain Gilliatt did not recognize, and an armed escort. The prisoner analogy struck Gilliatt even more forcibly, but deeper anxieties broke through that surface. He could not shake off Ashe's gloomiest prognostications.
"We'll go straight to NOIC," the captain informed them, assessing each of them swiftly then indicating the staff car with its driver. There was a jeep, too, for the escort. Gilliatt suddenly wanted to walk away from it all, get back in the motorboat and go on pretending that the war was winnable as long as he and others like him did their duty, carried out their allotted tasks.
He climbed into the back of the big Austin-next to Ashe, who smiled at him like an encouraging parent, as if Gilliatt were about to vanish round the dentist's door. The car pulled away immediately the captain got in next to the driver, hurrying out of the dock area as if towards some emergency. Milford was grey and drying after overnight rain, scoured by a cold wind that whistled outside the car windows. The captain in the front seat said nothing. The Austin pulled up the hill — Gilliatt resisted a valedictory look back at the low hull of Bisley slopping in the bay — and into the drive of the imposing house that had become NOIC's HQ for Milford.
The captain ushered them through the door, upstairs to what once had been a drawing-room but was now partitioned by board into three or four small offices with impossibly high ceilings and strips of green carpet that were off-cuts from other offices. Maps provided a temporary artwork, there w
as a paraffin heater for warmth, and a utility desk and chairs. One long window, which looked down towards the sound. Again, Gilliatt refused to acknowledge the image of Bisley. That, he knew with a sullen certainty, was part of the past already.
As if to confirm it, the captain's first words as he took their coats were to Gilliatt, and dropped heavy as stones.
"Admiralty Intelligence until a few years ago, Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir." The captain studied the tone for insolence, almost tasting it with a movement of his lips, then nodded, recognizing it as disappointment.
"Captain Ashe, if you would describe exactly what you encountered during your sweep of the suspect area?" The Intelligence captain sat down behind the desk, his bulk threatening it, the braid of office folded like handcuffs in front of him. Ashe told him.
"What did you do, Commander, after the first profound shock?"
Ashe looked at Gilliatt almost resentfully, as if to protest the unfairness of Gilliatt not having to answer the questions. Ashe appeared to Gilliatt to be reliving the experience. Shadows, forebodings, hovered round him. His captain had grown older in the passage of hours.
"We — I ordered the sweep to continue—" The captain raised his eyebrows, but nodded — 'then carried out our orders. I detached Bisley and we proceeded to check the channel that had already been swept."
The captain's eyes seemed suddenly alert, demanding as those of an interrogator.
"Yes? How far did you proceed — what course?"
"An hour. The swept channel is at almost ninety degrees to the channel we were sweeping. I — did not think it necessary to proceed to the southern edge of the minefield to ascertain the full extent of the sweep that had been carried out—" Ashe was picking his way through a booby-trapped area of emotive words, smoothing all evocation from his voice.