Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  "Peter, come on!" There were two men with rifles at the edge of the village. Small puffs of smoke appeared even as bullets buzzed near them. Gilliatt still did not move. Stone spattered on his jacket as another bullet ricocheted from the parapet of the bridge. "Get down!" he snapped at Maureen, and she sank into the shallow ditch at the side of the road in an attitude of prayer. McBride, head down, ran back to the bridge, moving as swiftly as he could, bent almost double below the level of the stonework. He grabbed Gilliatt's jacket, heaving him off-balance — the man was as stiff as a wooden crate — pulling him down beside him. The angle of the road to the bridge hid them momentarily from the riflemen. Gilliatt seemed shaken out of a trance.

  "Thanks."

  "Come on, keep low and move fast."

  McBride scuttled ahead of Gilliatt. Three shots nipped through the air above the bridge as McBride paused, then straightened and ran. Gilliatt followed him. McBride's arm ached intolerably from the damage of the grenade fragment and the effort of dragging Gilliatt down into the cover of the bridge. Maureen clambered out of the ditch as they heard the noise of a small car accelerating. McBride grabbed Maureen's arm, hurrying her up the road. The car's engine idled, presumably while their two closest pursuers climbed on board, then they heard it accelerate again.

  They laboured up the slope of the road. A field fell away from them towards the stream.

  "Down there!" McBride yelled, pointing towards the stream through a gate in the high hedge. "Come on!" There was a desperation close to enjoyment in his voice.

  Maureen swiftly opened the white gate. A grazing cow confronted her fearfully, great brown eyes puzzled and nervous. As she began running, it turned and lumbered away towards the rest of the small dairy herd shuffling away to her left. She felt her heart struggling for space with her ragged breaths in her chest cavity, felt herself choking but pushed on, leaning backwards as the slope of the field threatened her. Gilliatt caught up with her, his face grim. She did not worry about Michael behind them. She invested him with an expertise that approximated to omniscience. She could just hear the labouring car above the pound of her feet and blood. The herd was scampering in a dozen startled directions.

  Shots rang out, and bullets buzzed around her. There was an ignorant confidence about her body. She had never seen a bullet or a bullet wound. Gilliatt flinched at each report, each passage of a bullet through the air near them. Then, closer, a heavy revolver sounded twice, and there was a distant, insect cry. Then, almost immediately, McBride was running alongside them, yelling.

  "Spread out, spread out!" He veered off to the right himself, and Maureen went to her left. "Run zig-zag!" McBride gave the instructions without panic, with no sense of danger. If bullets hit them, his voice suggested, it would be like drowning in a shallow stream or swimming pool. Maureen tried to run first to left then to right, watching for betraying tussocks of grass that would trip her, sprain something.

  Then she lost her balance, and the stream was cold up to her knees, and her hands plunged into the water as she tried to keep upright. She felt smooth, slimy stones, twisted around, and Gilliatt grabbed her and stopped her from falling headlong. She felt herself shivering against him, his own body shaking with effort, his heart pounding. She looked behind her, following his gaze. McBride was alongside them in the water. Three men were coming down the slope of the field, leaving something in a fawn raincoat lying near the tall hedge, perhaps blown there by the wind, brown paper or something. She felt her thoughts slipping in and out of self-deception. Michael had killed one of them — brown paper—

  "Where now?" Gilliatt asked, his voice thick with phlegm. He spat to clear his mouth, and Maureen watched the phlegm move away and dissipate on the surface of the stream. McBride looked around him.

  Two more men — both of them dressed in reefer jackets and carrying machine-pistols — entered the field at its southern corner, back by the bridge. For the moment they were out of range and he discounted them except as a direction in which he could not go.

  "Up there," he said, pointing towards the rising ground to the north-west of the village. The sweep of his arm took in the pencil of smoke still rising from Ross Carbery in the still grey air. Rainspots, as if occasioned by the fire and the necessity of water, splashed on the back of his hand, spattered gently against the faces of all three of them. "Some bloody mist is what we need," McBride muttered. "Get going!"

  Gilliatt hauled Maureen out of the stream, and they began running again. She grabbed hold of his hand as she almost lost balance, and held onto it as they began labouring up the slope again towards another tall hedge marking the field's northern boundary. The noises of the rifles seemed distant and harmless. The rain fell more steadily, dampening their hair and faces. Neither of them gave any thought to McBride, except when the reports of the revolver impinged unwelcomely on them.

  Gilliatt pushed her through the gate, and she huddled into the ditch, her breathing stertorous and always threatening not to come at all. Gilliatt touched her shoulder, and she nodded because her mouth was too full for words. Then Gilliatt stood up, and she remembered with a moan that Michael was still behind them; the realization sprang on her like guilt. Gilliatt, prompted by her cry, sensed the revolver stuck uselessly into his waistband, a hard cancerous lump against his stomach. The drizzle soaked him, but refreshed him at the same time. He climbed out of the ditch, and saw McBride perhaps thirty or forty yards from him, arm out like a duellist, firing two shots back at the men who had reached the stream. One of them held his left arm limply at his side, as if he had no further use for it. A second man was kneeling, taking aim, and the third was crouching against the near bank of the stream. A tableau that he seemed to bring to life as he drew the revolver and took aim. It was an impossible distance, even in the windless conditions, but he squeezed the trigger more as a distraction. He was aware of the box of shells misshaping his left pocket, and confidently fired three more shots towards the stream. The pursuers were sufficiently distracted to seek the shelter of the stream's bank. McBride was toiling up the last of the slope to the hedge. The two men in reefer jackets were cutting the angle of the field towards them, but warily keeping out of range.

  "Master race, eh?" McBride said as he leaned against him for a moment, controlling his breathing. "Take no chances, let the local lads get themselves killed."

  "You think they're German?"

  "With those guns, yes." But McBride had lost interest already. He looked behind them, northwards. The land sloped down again towards the trees of a wood. The outliers were mere hundreds of yards from them. "Come on, then. No rest for the wicked."

  Maureen climbed out of the ditch, shaking off their aid, and they ran together towards the dark trees. The main road beyond the wood gleamed grey and wet like a boundary.

  McBride remembered the first time he and Maureen had made love in the insect-clamorous wood, one summer afternoon, her body cool only for a moment before he pressed down upon her, her face white and wondering and nervous. He wondered whether she remembered the occasion.

  They were into the trees before the pursuit achieved the hedge and any clear sight of them.

  * * *

  The First Sea Lord sat opposite the Prime Minister in the small office Churchill used habitually for his solitary moments of thought and decision. Few Cabinet colleagues were invited to join him here, but service chiefs had done, on certain dire occasions through the summer and autumn. The camp bed the Prime Minister rested on — when he could bring himself to rest— was unmade in one corner of the office. The room was thick with cigar smoke, and Churchill was in his shirt-sleeves, still unshaven and red-eyed with the consequences of a restless night. The First Sea Lord, having finished his briefing, was left fearing a reckless, even desperate decision from this tired old man whose pugnacious features seemed the solitary mask left to him, his country backed into the last corner.

  Churchill paced the room, cigar clamped into his tight lips, heavy jowls bristling as if he were parad
ing before an audience that must be impressed. The First Sea Lord wondered how Churchill would go to his death before an SS firing squad, and regretted the thought as sharply and immediately as treachery. Yet in this small office how could Churchill gain any perspective other than a hopeless one?

  As he silently asked the question, he was cognizant of the gulf between himself and the Prime Minister. He did not understand Churchill, and that lack of understanding could not be quite despised or disregarded.

  Churchill paused before the First Sea Lord's chair, his blue eyes alight. He said, round the cigar, "Your opinion?"

  "Of what, Prune Minister?" The First Sea Lord had to clear his throat before he spoke. The light immediately died in Churchill's eyes, and he moved away to look out of the single small window over the garden of No. 10. He seemed to dislike the sight of the ugly brick and concrete air-raid shelter for the staff, and turned back to confront the First Sea Lord.

  "This counter-measure." He indicated Walsingham's open file on his desk. Cigar smoke lifted to the ceiling.

  "We — cannot replace the missing section of the minefield without diverting the convoy."

  Churchill's eyes flared again, as if he could see the cruiser and the three merchant ships.

  "Fitzgerald—" he murmured softly.

  "Prime Minister?"

  "Nothing." He turned away again, then back. "We must have that convoy, at all costs, Admiral. If we can get it through, Congress will go on turning a blind eye to Lease-Lend and Roosevelt will send us more. It's our main artery." He paused, then, as if weighing some obscurer alternative, muttered again, "Fitzgerald—" He articulated carefully, loudly. "Order two minelayers to Milford Haven— as a stand-by. This requires more thought. I can't see the convoy go down in the North Channel, neither can I allow the Nazis—" He cut himself off. "Thank you, Admiral. Leave the Emerald file with me for the moment."

  * * *

  Patrick Terence Fitzgerald enjoyed the fierce wind much as he might have done had he been aboard a yacht or an old sailing ship. The westerly was sweeping spray across the quarter deck and gave the impression of driving the cruiser forward towards the Irish coast. That in itself might have made heavy, gloomy imagery, but the wind seemed to clean him, blow inside his head and remove the cluttered reflections which had afflicted him throughout the crossing. He wore no hat, let his grey hair be distressed, his ears and jaw go cold.

  Churchill. His image persisted. Churchill would know why he was coming, know what was at stake, want to stop him. Churchill, like a schoolboy, would want to fudge his examination because he had not mastered the syllabus. He would be lost, abandoned.

  Spray, whipped off the whitecaps, dashed in Fitzgerald's face and was saltily chilled by the wind at once, drying onto him. Churchill's image faded. The merchant ships astern were the first of their kind, and Fitzgerald knew they would be the last, after he made his report to Roosevelt. The wind and spray went on with their cleaning, numbing work, and a scattered, sudden sunlight splashed on the quarter deck like another good omen.

  October 198-

  The bright afternoon spread itself easily as a cat over the sofa and the carpet and the other furniture of the old, slightly dilapidated house on the Hastings seafront that had been converted into a seamen's home. The worn carpet was more evidently exposed by the sun's intrusion, the loose covers rendered more tasteless and chintzy, but McBride felt the room took on the character of the man to whom he was talking. Browned and worn and honourable with age. To be kept, not thrown away.

  The old man rolled himself another cigarette from dark tobacco, coughed his way through the first inhalations, and shook his head, his blue eyes folded into the contour marks of age around them. Abbott's face was a mass of wrinkles, and was easy to romanticize. He looked like an old explorer, an adventurer — embayed and dragged out of the water at some high tide and stranded here, hull stripped and re-caulked but never relaunched. McBride liked him, warmed to the man. And anticipated clarity of revelation.

  "No," Abbott said. "German submarines — U-boats for certain." Abbott had been Third Mate aboard Southwark Rose, and on the bridge when what he believed was a U-boat attack had commenced, and commanding one of the boat stations when the order to abandon ship had been given. According to his narrative, Southwark Rose had been hit for" ard and amidships by torpedoes. The boat he had managed to board in the last minutes of the ship's existence had been sighted the next day by a Coastal Command Anson and they'd been taken aboard a Royal Navy frigate in the evening.

  "You're certain of that, Mr Abbott?" McBride asked softly. The old man studied him as if the question insulted his memory. But he continued smiling with all the superiority of age and greater experience. An American historian could be forgiven a great deal, apparently.

  The cassette-recorder wound on silently. Occasionally, cars passing along the seafront disturbed the room's autumnal calm. McBride felt himself afloat on a slow calm sea, close to his home port. Claire Drummond's passion in their Canterbury hotel room had seemed equivalent to his own as if she, too, sensed the proximity of their destination. He felt relaxed, and the memory of Hoskins" death remained below the surface of the gleaming water.

  "Two torpedoes, Mr McBride. Ripped the old girl apart like a couple of tin-openers." He shook his head, horror transmuted to something harmless by time and survival.

  "What about the other ships?"

  "They went for the cruiser first — terrible." Something threatened to break through like a suddenly broken bone, but he went on in the same warm, mellowed voice: "They picked us off in turn."

  "You were in a minefield, Mr Abbott," McBride prompted.

  "Ah — that'd been swept, especially for us," the old man said knowingly, shaking his head slightly. "One or two of the lads joked about it, but the job had been done. They told us that."

  "Where did you go down, Mr Abbott. You were on the bridge, you'd know?"

  "Off the Old Head of Kinsale, southwest of Cork Harbour." The old man prided himself on his memory, and held this nugget of it up to his inspection, gleaming and undimmed by time.

  McBride exhaled slowly. He had it all now. Everything else would be merely corroborative. He said thickly, "And where exactly were you picked up, Mr Abbott?"

  "Ah. The boat was taking on water, and the rudder was useless. We drifted out into the channel, more or less southwest. We were a bit worried about the minefield, but our shallow draught must've kept us safe enough. The sea was kind to us. Spotted by an Anson out from one of the Cornish airfields, and picked up the same day. Weather worsened the very next day."

  "What was the name of the ship that picked you up?"

  "Ah." The old man dredged along the reef of memory. His eyes brightened again. "HMS Saundersfoot. Frigate."

  "Thank you, Mr Abbott, thank you."

  The old man seemed content now just to sit, and McBride shared his silence for a little time longer. The explosions, the screams, the shattered or detached limbs, the drowning, oil searing the lungs, the frenzy to launch the boats and pull away from the stricken Southwark Rose— all idled to the bottom of the gleaming water of his satisfaction. Nothing existed outside this sunlit room which contained the physical form that experienced nothing beyond a complete, egoistical satisfaction. The outline of his book lay in his thoughts like an unfolded map or a precise, graphed medical chart. He had it all. The German preparations, the sweeping of the minefield, the relaying of the mines, the murder by British mines of an American special envoy. An atrocity. He was made.

  It was the last, and most complete, time that he was to think of money in connection with the knowledge he possessed.

  * * *

  Ryan watched McBride and Claire Drummond go into a cafe with a mock-Tudor frontage just off the Promenade, then walked to the nearest telephone box and called Walsingham.

  "You're secure," Walsingham told him, his voice becoming slightly more distant as the scrambler was switched on. "Go ahead."

  "He's in Eastbourne, si
r. With the girl." He laid some slight emphasis on the latter phrase.

  "I'm afraid she is not to be considered separately from your assigned target," Walsingham replied. Ryan winced silently. He disliked his superiors when they began using jargon to disguise their proposed wet operations. Blood was going to be let out, breath stopped, physical shape altered irredeemably, but they always wanted to talk about operations and targets and necessities. Ryan had no compunction about murder on the orders of his superiors, but no liking for euphemisms as applied to the job he did.

  "Very good, sir. It would seem, from what we could pick up and his manner and the like, he knows most of it now, sir. He's like the cat who's had the cream."

  "Very well. Then the girl has to go. He may have confided in her."

  "Very good, sir. I'll have an operational report for you by this evening — eight at the latest." He reprimanded himself for his own euphemism. I'll have killed them by eight, sir.

  Walsingham broke the connection. Ryan stepped out of the call-box, letting the door swing shut behind him. The car was parked down the street, almost opposite the cafe. Walsingham, behind the induced blandness of the secure line and behind his almost imperturbable calm, was worried. Ryan sensed it like an odour in the call-box. Ripples moved out from the dropped stone that was Ryan's job and his limited view of the operation. Guthrie, Ulster, Washington—

  He would not be forgiven any mistakes.

  He returned to the car and nodded to the driver. Then, in order to settle the details of McBride's death in his mind, he took an OS map from the glove compartment — when the explosion ripped out the front of the Tesco supermarket three doors further down from the cafe where McBride and the girl were taking afternoon tea. Ryan, head snapping up even before the noise of the explosion followed the disturbance of the air and the alteration of the street's quiet perspective, saw the glass bulge in slow-motion then break into a million shards, flying across the street. Windows emptied. He ducked as the pressure-wave struck the car, rattling doors and windows then pushing in the windscreen so that it emptied over his neck and shoulders, prickling in the backs of his hands where they covered his head. Something warm and sudden spattered against him. In the moment he had ducked, he had seen two bodies lifted and flung outwards into the street, other people subsiding in hideous slow motion.