Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  He wanted two things from it — had the flotilla swept the British minefield, and had Gilliatt returned to Bisley with the captain?

  A small excitement was growing in his stomach. There had to be, had to be a link with Emerald Necklace.

  November 1940

  It was a cottage near Kersaint-Plabennec, a small village five kilometres from Plabennec. Gilliatt — and he suspected McBride shared the instinct, though they both remained silent on the subject — sensed a pall over their mission a mere two hours after they had parachuted from the Wellington into wooded country north of Tremaouezan. The cottage where the three members of the Resistance held their Wehrmacht prisoner was half a mile from a farm where German soldiers were billeted. Gilliatt wondered whether the man's screams had carried to his comrades, and shuddered.

  Lampau, the leader of the Resistance cell in the area, evidently still bore the mental scars of the summer, including a sense of having been betrayed by the British at Dunkirk. Yet, somehow, Walsingham had transformed him into a reliable source of intelligence regarding army and navy movements and dispositions in the area north of Brest and the port itself. Lampau's cell were saboteurs, and more recently assistants in escape for shot-down British airmen or torpedoed seamen. Gilliatt regarded Lampau, Foret, and the younger Venec as undisciplined, dangerous allies, even on such a temporary basis.

  McBride and he were now alone with the German prisoner they both knew would be executed as soon as he had surrendered what information he possessed. He was almost delirious, clutching his hands under his armpits because they had pulled out his fingernails; his face was swollen, reddened and cut where he had been beaten. None of the Frenchmen could speak German, the soldier could not speak English or French. The torture had been gratuitous, pointless. It sickened Gilliatt.

  "Name?" McBride rapped out in German.

  A long silence, ragged breathing, quiet groans, then: "Hoffer. Johannes Hoffer."

  "Number?" It was given. "Unit?"

  Another long silence, during which time the soldier huddled in the corner of the lamp-lit room which smelled of stored meal and cooking, McBride squatted next to him on his haunches, stone-like and unmoving, and Gilliatt leaned against the door as if to keep out the rabid Frenchmen who had hurt the boy.

  "Rifle Regiment, Third Fallschirmjaeger Division." Very quiet. McBride made him repeat it, then his head swung towards Gilliatt, his eyes wide in surprise. The boy was responding to the German language, to nothing else. He'd never envisaged this, that his life could end in a dirty French cottage after they had pulled out his fingernails with a pliers and beaten him into a semi-coma. For him, the German words came out of a pain-filled void, and he wanted the voice to go on speaking, and he would answer, make the voice go on speaking.

  "Billet?" The boy replied slowly. Gilliatt looked at the fair hair plastered close to the pink skull with sweat. He was impatient to be gone, blamed McBride because he had to go on looking at the suffering German. "Other units in the area?" McBride asked next, his accent clipped, military, officer-like. Another long silence, as if the boy hesitated or savoured the words like ointments.

  "Forty-fifth Division — Fourteenth Panzers, their grenadier and reconnaissance units—" Silence again, then, and the growing sense of the boy slipping away from them and wanting to hear them without interruption. And the sense in both of them that Lampau waited outside the door, eager to finish what he had started.

  "Thank you, Unteroffizier Hoffer," McBride said quietly, patting the boy lightly on the shoulder, and standing up. "Well done. You may rest now." Then, as if he divined the boy's need, he added, "We will come back and check on you later. Heil Hitler!"

  Gilliatt grimaced at the violent, black farce. McBride tried to usher him from the room, but he pulled away from the Irishman.

  "No—" he hissed.

  "Don't be a bloody fool, Peter!" McBride snarled almost under his breath. "Those French would kill us if we tried to stop them killing this boy. Forget it—"

  "How can I?"

  "By considering what you've just heard, man!" McBride had his hand firmly on the door handle. "These troops have been in the Plabennec area for less than two weeks, most of them. Lampau told us that — Hoffer is in the rifle regiment of a parachute division — a whole crack infantry division here, and Panzer experts. What does it sound like to you? Well, what does it sound like?" McBride, shorter than Gilliatt, had grabbed the other man's chin in his hand, turning his face towards him, averting his gaze from the crouching, semi-conscious Hoffer.

  "I suppose—"

  "Yes?"

  "A small, specialized invasion force — I agree with you, damn it!" Gilliatt wrenched open the door, passed Lampau who grinned mirthlessly, and went out of the cottage. McBride nodded to Lampau, who entered the room, while McBride, forgetting Hoffer almost at once, followed Gilliatt outside. Gilliatt was leaning against the wall of the cottage in the narrow passage between the house and the rickety barn, hugging himself, shivering helplessly. McBride could smell the vomit in the chill night air.

  "Peter?"

  "What do you want?" Hurt mistress or child.

  "Forget it — or think about the people you've known who've died. Anything, but not about one Wehrmacht Unteroffizier killed for invading France—" He put his hand on Gilliatt's shoulder, but it was shrugged away. "Peter, Peter, I don't like it any more than you do, but I'm not going to argue with Lampau for the sake of a German."

  "You're as bad as they are!" Gilliatt accused, turning on McBride.

  "I hope not, Peter," McBride whispered. Then he lit two cigarettes and offered one to Gilliatt, who coughed on the first inhalation of smoke, then seemed not to shiver so uncontrollably. McBride saw one white hand wipe across Gilliatt's mouth, eyes. "OK?"

  "Yes. Thanks."

  "There'll be a lot more of it. This is only the beginning, Peter, the cleanest bit of it—"

  "God, not really a Richard Hannay adventure, is it?" He laughed mirthlessly.

  "Maybe not, but it's the only adventure we've got right now."

  "Is that why you do it — adventure?"

  "Isn't it why you ran away to sea? Remember?" Both of them recalled their conversation on the bridge of the Bisley. "Well, maybe I do do it for the sake of the adventure, at that. But now, we have to get into Brest and have a look for those submarines. That'll be the final bit of proof that Charlie wants."

  "An invasion of Ireland?" McBride nodded. "What'll they do when they know for sure?"

  McBride shrugged. "God knows, Peter. Fill up the hole in the minefield for one, I should think. Maybe they'll send troops to Ireland — who knows?"

  "Fill up—?"

  "Come on. Lampau will have cleared away the remains by now. He has to get us into Brest before first light. The rest will be up to us."

  A dog barked suddenly, startling them. Neither of them had heard a dog on the smallholding before. Sound carrying from the farm, Gilliatt wondered—

  Then torchlight, wobbling before it was flicked off. Across the field, a hundred yards away. Nothing else to be seen in the black, moonless dark. McBride was quicker than Gilliatt to realize the danger, because Gilliatt was struggling to recall why they dare not re-sow the St George's Channel minefield, not yet—

  "God, it's the Germans. Peter, Peter, come on, damn you — the Germans have come looking for Hoffer!"

  * * *

  Walsingham was working late in his office at the Admiralty — no more spacious than a large cupboard, as if to remind him of his temporary commission with the Royal Navy — preparing his report for the First Sea Lord. He was drafting it in the certain knowledge that his conclusions were the right and only permissible ones, and drafting it, too, in the light of possibly making his case after McBride's death. Walsingham regretted that he had had to send McBride — Gilliatt as a virtual stranger he cared far less about — but he had been near panic, desperate for proof that would be irrefutable. He was aware that a massive inertia, compounded by a nerveless fear that ha
d grown since the cancellation of Sea Lion, conspired to blind the Admiralty, the War Office, possibly even the Cabinet to any version of reality that might prove catastrophic. He had to convince men who did not want to contemplate disaster or envisage any threat that might overwhelm them.

  He shuffled the handwritten sheets in front of him, then leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He wondered briefly about McBride, then excised him from his mind, realizing as he did so that he was behaving with the same bunkered disregard for realities which so angered him in their Lordships. Even March, who should have been convinced by now.

  He yawned.

  Another reality insisted, came to light and to a sudden prominence in his mind so that he could not ignore it. The convoy. What could they do about the convoy?

  And, with a colder insistence, something stirred like a nightmare he had not relived since childhood but which was now coming back with all its old force; an idea that had the terror of a shambling, nameless creature, an idea he knew, finally, would be adopted.

  A war crime — would they call it that?

  Yes.

  October 198-

  Sir Charles Walsingham, Head of the Directorate of Security, MI5, sat in his spacious civil servant's office in the Home Office, where his official rank was Permanent Under-Secretary, his fingers splayed upon the green blotter in the middle of his oak desk. He seemed possessed by an old dream or nightmare, his lips compressed to a single thin line, his forehead deeply trenched with creases, his eyes vacant yet inwardly intent and mesmerized. It was late in the evening, and outside in Parliament Street the lamps bloomed in soft, insinuating rain. His room was lit by his table-lamp and by an ornate standard lamp in one corner. He preferred the shadows at that moment.

  He had called at the Home Office before returning to his flat in Chesham Place. Drummond's cryptic, almost insolent telephone message was waiting for him in his aide's neat, womanish handwriting — a large question mark beneath the final words.

  Drummond he had never liked, forty years before at the height of the affair. McBride's control — and yet Walsingham had possessed a deep affection for the rootless, uncaring Irishman and nothing more than civility towards the Englishman, Drummond. He remembered at one time, possibly in "41 or "42, they'd suspected Drummond of assisting German agents in Ireland — which had been patent nonsense, and nothing more than the hare-brained guesswork of one of the reckless young men who succeeded McBride…

  Why had he remembered that about Drummond?

  He would call Drummond in the morning, expecting to get no more than that out of him. But the son — McBride's son, of all people in the world. Now, at this critical time—

  For a moment, he suspected an elaborate and devious plot — then dismissed the idea as ridiculous. It was nothing more than the externalizing of his own selfish fears. What the devil could young McBride drag up? Anything — everything? If he did, then Walsingham himself was finished, Guthrie was certainly finished — perhaps Ulster itself, even this government…

  The ripples spread on the ruffled pond of his imagination. McBride was a heavy stone, and he had already been thrown, apparently. He would have to be watched. There ought to be nothing — no clues — for him to discover, but after forty years who could any longer be sure that there were no scraps of paper, no old memories, no loose tongues lying around. McBride — Walsingham had read Gates of Hell and disliked it — was looking for an angle, for something sensational. The Emerald business would be just what he would be looking for.

  In that office, it was hard for Walsingham to feel genuinely fearful. Forty years of power, privilege and ascent were a barrier against fear. But, he still could not control his imagination, even though nothing of its images transferred to nerves or sweat-glands. He wasn't twitching, or getting damp, but he knew, with a kind of cold fear that went on thinking clearly, envisaging the consequences, that everything was at the hazard, that McBride could, with the right information, ruin everything.

  Then the small selfish thought — war crime. He'd be finished, buried by an avalanche of contumely, national and international. Most of the other decision-makers and decision-takers were dead. He would retire next year. He was already beyond official retirement age for his rank in the civil service. Now, he'd be the one — he and Guthrie, of course, the obedient instrument — who'd be blamed for the Emerald Decision.

  He picked up one of the telephones on his desk. McBride, and quickly — whereabouts, recent enquiries, state of knowledge.

  Possible solutions.

  He'd ring Guthrie later, before the Minister retired for the night—

  But of all people, McBride's son — now of all possible times…

  CHAPTER NINE

  According to the Record

  November 1940

  Gilliatt had a hurried, confused impression of the smells of dung, butter, then warm hay as he followed McBride along a lightless path between cottage and barn and into the silent, dark interior of the latter. A horse whinnied softly, disturbed by the creaking of the door.

  "Michael?" he called, losing sight of McBride's shadowy form almost at once when the door was shut behind them.

  "Over here," came the reply. Gilliatt moved gingerly across the uneven floor of the barn-cum-stable, catching his shin against a sharp-edged implement and swearing softly, shuffling his feet in the strewn hay. McBride's hand grabbed him, pulled him down behind a mound of hay, pressing him close to it, almost making him sneeze.

  "What are they looking for?" he whispered, hearing distantly the bark of the dog, and the rapping of a fist or boot against the door of the cottage.

  "With the dog — Hoffer is my guess," McBride whispered back, irritated by his companion as by a slow-learning pupil. "He's been reported missing. Perhaps Lampau and his goons nabbed him a couple of hours earlier than they need. Walsingham wouldn't be pleased at that. Listen!"

  Gilliatt strained his hearing. Voices being raised, one French — but he couldn't pick out the words — and the other German. Then the slamming of a door. A few moments later, the fractured, eager barking of the dog.

  "The scent—" Gilliatt whispered.

  "They've given it Hoffer's scent all right. I wonder where the body is?"

  As if in reply or confirmation, the dog's barking became almost frantic, and had moved out of the house again, presumably behind the cottage.

  "What about us?"

  "Wait!"

  Gilliatt was aware of the hay beneath and around him, its rich, stored smell heady, almost nauseous to the stomach he had so violently emptied. He listened, sensed McBride beside him alert and motionless. The dog went on barking, and behind its noise orders were being shouted. A French voice, raised in protest, but they could clearly hear the strained, high-pitched fear in it. Where had Lampau, Foret, Venec been when they heard the knock on the door? McBride had had no time to warn them, perhaps not even the inclination. They had run immediately for the shelter of the barn.

  They each heard the running footsteps, distinctly, in the moment before the first shots from a machine-pistol on automatic. The bullets thudded into the wall of the barn behind them, then something else, something heavier, collided with the same wall, slithered down in a grotesque aural impersonation of reptilian movement. Gilliatt, swallowing bile, wondered which one of them it was. He almost hoped that it was Lampau. Then he heard the revolver firing.

  "What—?" he began.

  "It couldn't work out better for us, Peter. They'll get themselves killed, all three of them." A burst from a machine-gun, the answering chatter of the Schmeissers. The horse whinnied more loudly, shuffled nervously in its stall. Gilliatt couldn't even see it as a shape in the lightless barn. Revolver again, then machine-pistols, then the machine-gun cut off in mid-sentence. The revolver three, four times, then a drowning chorus from the German machine-pistols.

  Then silence, into which dripped like water the sound of boots moving about the yard, grunts of satisfaction, the noises of someone wounded who was
lifted up and carried — the boot-noises became slower, heavier — and a single pistol shot as someone dying was finished off. A tidiness about the sounds of the aftermath. The dog had ceased to bark.

  It might even have been dead.

  Gilliatt and McBride waited for fifteen minutes, and then there were no other noises. McBride nudged Gilliatt and rose to his knees.

  "Come on — our chance now."

  Gilliatt stood up, fastidiously clearing stalks of hay from his clothing. Then what McBride had said struck him.

  "You wanted them to die, didn't you?"

  "Not at all. But they can't talk now, can they? And, Peter, you'd have killed them all half an hour ago, just for hurting the German lad. Mm?"

  McBride moved to the door of the barn, and opened it slowly and as silently as he could. It creaked with the slowness, the mounting noise of a yawn. McBride stepped outside. A minute later, he called to Gilliatt to join him.

  "What do we do now?"

  "Use the van they collected us in. Drive to Brest, of course."

  Gilliatt sensed the excitement in McBride. They were perhaps fifteen or twenty kilometres from the centre of the port, and from Lampau's cousin, a fisherman.

  "Lampau — he was to vouch for us."

  "We'll explain — don't make difficulties, Peter. Don't give in to the sense of doom."

  "You knew—?"

  "Ah, it happens every time. One of the things you have to put to the back of your mind, every time. Come on."

  The van was waiting at the back of the cottage, where Foret had parked it. One of its doors was open. McBride touched the door and then inspected his hand, sniffing the dark blood. He nodded, then began to examine the bodywork of the van, near the engine. He found no bullet-holes, and lifted the bonnet.