by Craig Thomas
The engine of the smack was running rough, doctored by the engineer, a cousin of Perros, coughing and chugging with a worrying irregularity had the crew not expected it. McBride's hands became stiff and frozen as he fumblingly worked at checking the heavy, tangled nets, and he concentrated on what he had to do when they reached Lanilon. Occasionally, he looked up as the grey shape of a warship or submarine slid past them in the murk. Perros's boat was unlikely to be challenged, at least not until they neared the breakwater. He welcomed the weather. Gilliatt, seemingly absorbed in his task, appeared oblivious of weather or danger.
The engine cut out, dying throatily like an asthmatic old man. The boat suddenly wallowed in the tide. McBride looked beyond the bow, seeing the grey harbour wall loom in the sleet, then disappear, then re-emerge. They had rounded the Pointe de Portzic, and were drifting towards the western end of the huge harbour. At the western end were the U-boat pens.
The smack drifted under the shadow of the wall, which stretched over them like a great dam. The tide chopped whitely against its base. The minutes limped by. Perros, in the wheelhouse, used the rudder as best he could against the tide and wind, turning the boat portside-on to the harbour wall. The swell caused the boat to lurch repeatedly. Through the squalling snow, McBride could see no other vessels, and no guards on top of the breakwater. The nearest steps down to the water were also obscured.
He touched Gilliatt on the arm, startling him out of a fixed attention to the nets, and nodded. Then he went forward to the wheelhouse. Perros, hands whitened with effort on the wheel, glanced at him.
"The steps are a hundred metres or more ahead of us," he said. Beside him, a nephew scanned the water ceaselessly for other vessels, swinging his glasses in an arc across the wheelhouse screen.
"Can you make it?"
"Maybe. This tide is doing its best to stop me!" He grinned. He'd taken Lampau's death without emotion earlier that morning, almost without comment. He evidently did not blame the two Englishmen, rather seemed to admire them, and to be flattered that they required and needed his assistance. "If we have to start the engine, so be it. It can always cut out again!" McBride nodded, collected his own binoculars from the rear of the cramped, fuggy, fish-stenched wheelhouse — engine-oil smells seeping through the deck planking from the tiny engine-room below. "Good luck," Perros called after him as he went out again.
McBride looked up at the threatening wall, now only yards from the ship's deck. Ahead of them, he could see the steps. He heard the ringing of the wheelhouse telegraph as Perros called for the engine's power. A cough, stutter to life, and the smack pushed forward. The engine throbbed through the deck planking. McBride waited as the steps neared, aware that Gilliatt and the two sons were watching him intently. The engine died suddenly, and McBride wondered whether it had really broken down. Then the boat lurched with the tide against the harbour wall, planks straining, crying out, then the boat began to move away. He jumped, glasses banging against his chest. His hands grappled with the slimy seaweed of the bottom step, water splashed over the tops of his sea-boots, then a wave drenched him up to the waist as he began to slip, his grasp loosened.
He scrabbled for a hold, catching an iron mooring-ring set in the concrete of the lowest exposed step, pushing at the same time with his feet against a seaweed-slippery step beneath the water. Then he pulled himself up, resting only when he was above the reach of the tide.
He sat down. Gilliatt gave him a thumbs-up signal from the stern of the fishing-boat, and Perros's two sons were smiling. The smack had lurched away from the breakwater, wallowing helplessly. Then Claude Perros held up the mooring-rope at the stern, and McBride, suddenly frightened by the insecurity of his perch on the steps and chilled by the wind blowing against the soaking trousers beneath his oilskins, climbed to the top of the harbour wall where the wind heaved at him, trying to throw him back into the water. He waved his arms, and the rope snaked out towards him from the stern of the smack. He caught it, but his frozen fingers could not close on it before its weight dragged it over the edge of the wall. He waited, freezing, while Claude hauled it in, looped it, then threw again. The rope landed like a heavy, arresting hand across McBride's shoulder and he grabbed it tightly, then dragged it to the nearest mooring-ring, looping it through and making it fast.
When they had bow and stern lines fast the smack wallowed only gently in the lee of the wall, the line of old car-tyres down its port side rhythmically rubbing against the concrete of the wall. Perros looked up at him through the screen of the wheelhouse, and waved him to hurry. Engine repairs was the fiction of their need to tie up, but any patrol vessel that found them would tow them away from the sensitive area of the U-boat pens.
McBride crossed to the inner lip of the breakwater, looking into the streaming sleet blowing the length of the massive harbour. The huge breakwater had been built at the end of the century parallel with the beach to enclose a huge harbour, and the port of Lanilon on the western outskirts of Brest was developed. When France had fallen in the middle of 1940, the Germans had almost immediately begun the building of the concrete submarine pens for their U-boats, from which the raiders put out into the North Atlantic to intercept the convoys from neutral America and Canada to a desperate Britain.
McBride could see, away to his left as he stood on the final section of the breakwater wall and almost a couple of hundred yards from the shoreline and the port, the crude concrete bunkers under which huddled, as if against the storm rather than an air raid, the lines of U-boats. He could dimly make out the stern-on shapes of perhaps a dozen vessels undergoing refuelling, refits, repairs, rearming. The tunnels of the separate pens offered themselves to the view through his binoculars like open mouths containing the squat cigars of the U-boats.
He would have to get closer, changing the angle at which he could see them. Numbers alone interested him, designations in white on the conning-towers. The wind howled at him, making him lean into it to preserve his balance, but he felt gratitude towards it now that he was moving along the breakwater towards the guard-post, a grey concrete blockhouse astride the wall where it met the shoreline. Here it scanned the harbour wall and controlled traffic into the pens. If he were spotted—
Slowly, the angle of perception changed until the conning-towers of the two closest submarines began to betray tall white numbers. He could not make them out. The blockhouse was less than a hundred yards away, and he felt naked and exposed, and almost at the mercy of the storm. A gull screamed near his head, then was flung away by the wind, and he shuddered. He had to look as if he was heading for the blockhouse, in case they spotted him, and yet he had to incriminatingly use the glasses. He hunched a shoulder to the shore, raised the glasses, and looked. He could see the white stick of the figure 1, nothing more. The blockhouse was sixty yards ahead of him, and unless they were all blind or dead in there he must be spotted at any moment. He moved on slowly, hunched and leaning against the wind, glasses clenched against his chest in one frozen hand. The figure 1 was accompanied by the half-crescent that might have been the figure 0. His heart jumped almost painfully. A little closer, just a little — if it was a nought, then there had to be a 1 in front as well as behind.
He could see the numbers on the boats in Guernsey. He did not need to match them. QIC knew that U-99 to U-108 were all large boats like the two of the series he had seen. Any one in the series would be the proof he needed.
Forty yards — come on, come on, they must have seen me. He could not make out the numerals without the aid of the glasses, not through the murk of sleet and wind. Was it a nought, a zero — just 0?
Come on, come on—
He could see 01, he could see the two distinct numerals, 0 and 1. U-101. One of the series of boats that had been used for minesweeping duties in the St George's Channel. He was oblivious to his surroundings for a moment, enjoying a sense of triumph which was rare and selfish and self-congratulatory. They knew, they knew—
At the same instant that he recognized t
he numerals, he also sensed the deserted nature of the pens. No noise above the wind, no flare of acetylene, no hammer of riveting, no sign of any human being near the seaward ends of the two pens he could see most clearly. Waiting. The U-boats were waiting—
He caught the flash of welding from a distance along the pens. But here, with these nearest two, then others, there was nothing.
He felt newly chilled by the wind against his side.
"You there!" the voice called. Put up your hands! Come here!" The German spoke reasonable French. McBride, as he raised his hands, letting the glasses dangle from their strap against his chest, guessed he might have come from Alsace. "Who are you?" There were two of them, each armed with a machine-pistol, coming towards him from the blockhouse.
* * *
"Charles, is indifference to human life a form of madness?" March was seated in his office, and the slim buff folder with the single stencilled word Emerald lay before him on the desk. He had been reading the typed sheets — one copy only — and now he sat back, rubbed his eyes with strain or disbelief, and asked his question of Walsingham, who let no answering emotion appear on his face; a face that was wan, chalky with sleeplessness, dark stains beneath the eyes that met March's gaze levelly.
"This is simply a projection, Admiral." All his anger, even his premonition of guilt, was squeezed into the excessive formality of his reply. He had known how it would be, had understood in advance as he worked on the draft of Emerald through the night and morning, that it would brand him. He would be regarded in the Admiralty corridors as a strange and dangerous species, a disease-carrier. The images whereby he presented himself to himself were melodramatic, but he did not consider them overstated or false. He could already see the glazed, suspicious look in March's eyes.
"Naturally. You couldn't murder this many people without the permission of your seniors, could you, Charles?" The irony sat like an undigested meal on both of them. March wanted to disregard what he had read, even make light of it, thereby restoring a former impression of Walsingham. But this — what was he to make of it? Overwork, black humour, plain lunacy?
"Sir, you've assumed that I'm somehow working towards that final outcome — I'm not. What I have projected is a possible sequence of events which would produce a desirable result at a great cost. I understand the morality of it, Admiral, but I also understand the possible necessity—" He stopped himself, drawing tight the strings on the bag of his temper. Coolness was his only ally, and would be in the days ahead. There was a long way to go.
"Are you suggesting this, or not?" His hand brushed fiercely towards the open file as if it was infested with cobwebs.
"I'm suggesting that it might become our only feasible alternative, Admiral. If it achieves that status, then that is the operational plan we would, or might, follow."
"My God, you know who's on board the cruiser, don't you?"
"I do."
"We'd divert it, of course."
"Not yet."
"Of course not yet."
"We must consider the effect on the Germans, though — surely?"
The dialogue snapped between them now, electrical sparks. Both men were tense, stiff in their chairs. Walsingham found himself defending the appalling logical outcome of Emerald even though he felt a profound loathing for it, and sensed he had begun a process in himself the end of which he could not envisage. What might he begin now to consider as no more than a necessity of war? Emerald was an idea that had been waiting for someone to think it. Why had it lodged in his mind?
"Of your plan?"
"Yes — my plan." The reluctance was simply the slightest hesitation. "It would be a significant, perhaps crucial, propaganda victory."
"Or it might, even if it remained secret, have a profound effect on German military morale?" Walsingham nodded. "And— the convoy to have been sunk by U-boats in the North Channel?" Again, Walsingham nodded. March seemed to wish to reiterate his ideas aloud, as if to make them the objects of a cool, rational analysis, and he had no objection to not voicing them himself. "And if it came out, the Americans would never enter the war, might even sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler. We'd be finished."
"Its secrecy would have to be maintained," Walsingham commented. "But we might only stop this invasion by destroying it. And we could lose the convoy anyway." His face darkened further. He stared at the open file. "We both know what cannot be done. We cannot contact the convoy. The Germans would intercept the message. We don't know their state of knowledge of our codes, but we suspect the worst — and the convoy would be doomed anyway if it was diverted by a signal from the Admiralty."
"There are other ways — signal them by lamp from an Anson," March said quickly.
Walsingham said, "As long as they're not spotted first. I have mentioned that possibility on page five."
"I know you have, Charles. You've been very clever all the way through this — thing." His distaste was evident, undisguised.
"Sir. This is a projection only. Many of the factors that would make it likely, or inevitable, have not yet occurred or appeared. Will you lock it away as a projected course of action, and only as that?"
"Very well. This is the only copy?" Walsingham nodded. March seemed momentarily obsessed with the idea of destroying the file. Then he said, "It mustn't come to this, Charles."
"No, sir. It mustn't. Unfortunately, it might." March was unprepared to reply, dismissing Walsingham with a curt nod of his head.
* * *
Patrick Terence Fitzgerald was walking on the quarter deck of the cruiser, the wind clutching at the hat he had jammed on his head, and chilling him. Yet he accepted his coldness as a relief from the days he had spent in his cramped cabin, and the noisy wind as a refreshing agent. He was alone, and most grateful for that. The sun gleamed fitfully through cloud, and the sea was grey and moving like the smooth backs of hundreds of whales, great long swells barely flecked with white, oily and somehow alive and sentient. He had gained what the British captain had called his sea-legs, he supposed, and his body rolled and angled expertly with the movement of the big ship. He had been slightly nauseous during the bad weather of the first couple of days, but not since. He was still, however, alien and a non-aquatic life-form on the ship, isolated and depressed; his state of mind an intellectual limbo in which endless recollection of his last meetings with the President only dimmed and dulled the importance of his mission, the significance it gave a friend of Roosevelt who had been a full-time banker and a part-time special adviser.
He took off his hat, irritated with the effort to keep it in place, as if such effort were beneath his dignity. His grey hair was clipped close to his head and remained unruffled. The cold had outlined the face more sharply — the square, stiff jaw, the long lines from cheekbones to mouth and chin, the prow of a nose and the narrowed blue eyes. He strode more quickly for a few minutes as if narrowing the distance between himself and an island off Europe that he knew well.
Fitzgerald's mission was to act as Roosevelt's special envoy to Great Britain — nothing more and certainly nothing less. He was to co-ordinate the efforts and observations and advice of other Americans working inside and outside the embassy, and to assess for the eyes of the President alone the ability of Britain to go on fighting. Roosevelt could not commit the US to more than Lease-Lend; Congress would have destroyed any such effort, and Roosevelt's position would soon have become untenable. Fitzgerald he trusted, perhaps absolutely. And Fitzgerald had three months in which to assess Britain's position — to help Roosevelt decide whether Lease-Lend should be maintained, increased, or ended.
For, contrary to public opinion and the belief of the British Government, Roosevelt was beginning to regret his involvement in Lease-Lend and the possibility of the US being sucked into a European war when the Japanese had begun threatening the Pacific. That would be America's war. Fitzgerald knew that at least part of Roosevelt wanted Britain to fall, and fall quickly, so that he could turn his attention to the Japanese, this time w
ith the full stupport of Congress. Fitzgerald knew that he was, in part, designed to be a hatchet-man.
Fitzgerald had spent a great deal of time during the past two decades in England. He possessed for the country the affection mingled with mistrust of a sophisticated Bostonian whose family had originated in Ireland and who had fled to America from the horrors of the potato famines. He enjoyed England's landscape and its culture. Part of him could never forgive its rulers and its people. He always thought of himself as an Irish-American. And perhaps it was the tinge of jaundice to his affection that had caused Roosevelt to employ him. The President had certainly put the alternatives bluntly to him. If Britain is going to win, then America must continue, even increase her support. If Britain is going down, then—
He moved more quickly, this time perhaps to escape the bald, unfeeling realpolitik advanced by the President and which he knew lay in himself. He agreed with Roosevelt. If Britain was a lost cause then America must write her off as a bad debt, and turn to the Pacific.
He had chosen to travel in this experimental convoy rather than fly to Britain because he wanted first-hand encounters with British fighting-men, and the opportunity to observe their morale at his leisure.
And he was beginning to believe that Britain was beaten. Worn-down, worn-out, finished. Kept going by stubbornness, sheer bloody-mindedness, and inability to accept the defeat that loomed ahead of her. The Japanese were poised to take Burma after Indo-China, then maybe India. The Germans had Britain by the throat and Europe and North Africa under their heel. The British were finished — a sad, undeniable fact. Roosevelt, three weeks after being elected for his third term of office, was similarly saddened and similarly certain.