Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  Drummond had met Menschler, a staff officer for Sealowe and then for Smaragdenhakkette, on a number of previous occasions, in Berlin before the war and three times when he had visited the Irish Republic as an accredited embassy official. His real purpose had been to consult with Drummond on the proposed invasion beaches and the parachute landing areas for Emerald Necklace. But Drummond had never found himself warming to the stiff, chilly Prussian with the Iron Cross always wrapped in a handkerchief in his civilian pocket. Drummond was almost certain that it was the man he disliked; only occasionally would the sense of the man's German-ness remind him of the stark light that nationality played upon his own treachery.

  Now, he wanted Menschler out of the way so that he could contact London.

  Drummond felt himself diminished by his anxiety, by a pressing, enlarging sense of his duplicity. He was aware of it making the skin he was interested in saving crawl as Menschler, sitting opposite him in the study of the farmhouse, continued to discuss the movement of the airborne troops to the coast, and the possibility of counter-measures by the Irish government or Churchill. He knew now that he did not possess the commitment, that he did not wish to cast aside his mask, declare his hand. Drummond wanted to insure himself by warning the Admiralty of the landings. He assumed that the twenty-four hours before the seaborne landings was insufficient time for the British to mount any effective counter-attack — the Irish would not move, he was certain, as was the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin — but if he reported the parachute landings he would retain the appearance of still working for the Admiralty. Then, in the event of some disaster, he would be in the clear—

  And he had a great desire to be in the clear. There was this growing sense of being alone, of being in personal danger, that could not be alleviated by news of the success of the parachute landings or the suggested might of the Wehrmacht, even the genius of the Führer. McBride worked at the corner of his mind like an irritating mote. Him, or someone like him — one to one — was all that was needed, and he would be dead. The craven surrender to a sense of personal danger disappointed him, but he could not any longer ignore it.

  "Very well, Drummond, now I will talk to the company commanders, then we will make our little tour, yes?" Menschler stood up with a nod, dismissive and superior, and went out of the room. Drummond, appalled at himself, strained to hear the closing of the door, even the footsteps across the yard to the barn where Menschler's staff had set up their HQ. Then, when only the wind's sound reached him from outside, he scurried to the kitchen and the cellar door, heading for the radio equipment by means of which he would warn the Admiralty of the reported landings of German parachutists in County Cork. A simple message that he was now certain would save his life.

  * * *

  Churchill paced the tiny, cigar-fouled office, the file labelled Emerald open on the desk between him and Walsingham, sitting silent and stiff on a hard upright chair. Even as he had sat there, Drummond's message from Kilbrittain had been conveyed to Churchill, interrupting their conversation. Churchill now seemed possessed of almost demonic energy, none of which he could satisfy or express or exude. It remained within him, galvanizing and bullying his frame like a seizure.

  The dawn outside the one window combined with the overhead light to create starkness, even the sordid. A time for quarrels and for machinations.

  Churchill picked up the telephone and in clipped, precise tones that still would not allow the captive energy to escape, ordered an emergency meeting of the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff for nine that morning. When he put down the receiver again, he was staring at Walsingham with glowing eyes.

  "So, it's begun, young man?" he said, hands on his wide hips, belly protruding from his unbuttoned waistcoat, hardly contained by the thin gold chain of his pocket watch. Then the big cigar was waving at him, pressed between two fat fingers. "What d" you think the Irish PM will do about it?"

  "I–I don't know, Prime Minister."

  "My bet is he'll do nothing, crafty as he is, and not without courage." Churchill's eyes misted for a moment. "Fait accompli, I think about covers it, don't you? Oh, they might join in if we did something—" He looked down at his desk. "This scheme of yours. I think it's time to put the first stages of it into operation, don't you?"

  Churchill picked up the telephone, and was connected almost at once with the First Sea Lord. He ordered the two minelayers to put to sea, and to relay the breached channel in the St George's Channel field. Then, he put down the telephone. Walsingham was breathless with the ease with which part of Emerald had become reality, and with the responsibility suddenly thrust upon him. Emerald was his scheme. It was now his Siamese twin, indivisible from him for the remainder of his life. He almost wanted to tear up the last few pages of the file. Churchill seemed to guess his feelings.

  "Nervous, Commander?" he asked, almost slyly.

  "I—"

  "You wonder how much of Emerald will be put into effect, eh?" Walsingham, with a dry throat, merely nodded. "Not your concern, young man. Thank you for coming."

  Walsingham, summarily dismissed, obediently made his way to the door. As he glanced back, he saw that Churchill was idly flicking over the pages of the Emerald file.

  * * *

  Lt Commander David Guthrie watched the slow dawn crawling across the sound and the low hills behind Milford Haven, innocent and with the promise of a fine day. Yet a greyness not entirely created by the seeping of the day into the landscape lingered across the waters of the sound, and the two minelayers, his own Palmerston and HMS Gladstone to port, seemed to be sailing towards the night which lingered out beyond St Anne's Head. He had opened the sealed envelope delivered the previous night by Admiralty guard, and pondered his orders to undo the work of the minesweeping flotilla the previous week.

  The thoughtfulness, the guesswork had now, for some inexplicable reason, become foreboding. Perhaps only for the convoy which would now be rerouted through the much more dangerous North Channel to the Mersey—

  Yet that seemed insufficient to account for his chilliness, for the persistent greyness of the dawn, for the sense of quiet almost unbroken by gulls" cries that seemed to hang over the sound as heavily as a blanket.

  * * *

  Through the remainder of the night and the early morning — which came with a grey clinging mist full of winter and a seeping drizzle that soaked them — they moved at first east until they skirted the tiny hamlet of Liss Ard, then McBride took them south, into the hills and towards the coast at Toe Head, where he had now decided they must acquire a boat of some kind. His thinking was imprecise, instinctive. Dominating everything was his betrayal by Drummond — he studiously ignored all Gilliatt's doubts and hesitations on the matter — and the need now to stay free long enough to get back to Crosswinds Farm in Kilbrittain. Both Maureen and Gilliatt receded in importance to him, considered only as encumbrances. Whenever a cooler perception of himself arose from looking at his wife, or from the workings of memory aroused by the familiar landscape, he crushed it beneath his hatred of Drummond. He was on a pinnacle of egocentricity.

  The hills were draped in thick mist and Gilliatt and Maureen were tired and dispirited with little or nothing to drive them. Gilliatt, like McBride, assumed that the Germans could not have landed without attracting the attention of agents — British or Irish — and the Admiralty would know within hours. Gilliatt worried about the outcome of events, but accepted his powerlessness in the face of them. More and more, he fell into step and feeling with Maureen.

  They came down from the hills, where there was no sign of German troops. McBride moved through the landscape like an angry dreamer, as if he exuded the mist that blotted it out, while Maureen leaned against Gilliatt with chill and weariness. Gilliatt felt diminished by his role, and angry with McBride, yet he felt the growth of some obscure responsibility for the woman, even as he recognized that his image of her and her marriage was based on the briefest acquaintance and was probably worthless. She seemed to accept an
d use him like a coat or a fire.

  Lickowen, the tiny scattering of cottages overlooking Toe Head Bay, where McBride expected to find a boat, had already been occupied by Germans. The mist betrayed them, allowing them a sense of unchanged calm in the hamlet until it was too late to run. One startled young soldier on guard raised one shout before they saw him at the crossroads, which brought without seeming delay three more soldiers on the run from behind a white-painted, blind-windowed cottage. McBride raised the machine-pistol, but Gilliatt knocked it from his grasp with his MP40, then threw down his gun. McBride looked at him in hatred, but Gilliatt merely shrugged and raised his arms tiredly above his head. The sleepless night, the gnawing emptiness of his stomach, Maureen's flagging body, the suddenness of the surprise — all conspired to drain him of resistance. Even as he raised his hands, he had an image of Ashe, telling him of the defeatism riddling the Admiralty. He'd thrown down his own gun in a similar mood. The Germans were here, everywhere. There was no point to it—

  An Unteroffizier inspected the two machine-pistols, then stepped back, a grin on his face. He was younger than either of them, and he was enjoying their capture without thinking of the Germans they had killed to get the guns. He spoke in a thick Bavarian accent, but both McBride and Gilliatt understood him.

  "We've got them. Well done, Willi. These are the bastards who turned up in the middle of the landing—" He seemed to remember something then, and stepped half a pace towards McBride, whose face showed more defiance.

  McBride tensed, almost inviting some suicidal encounter. Then the Unteroffizier said in bad English, his pleasure at their easy capture unalloyed: "We invite you to breakfast," and laughed. He directed them, with, his own MP38, towards the cottage from which they had appeared.

  There was one other soldier in the cottage, already devouring bacon and eggs, cooked by an old woman with wispy grey hair trailing the shoulders of her black dress. She hardly looked up from the stove and the frying pan as they entered, merely seemed to register, waitress-like, the arrival of extra mouths to be fed, and the Unteroffizier motioned them to chairs round the table. As he sat down, Gilliatt accepted the weariness that sidled up from his feet and ankles and calves, encasing him like shroud. Maureen laid her head on the table, closing her eyes with relief. She was simply glad to stop running. The instant she laid down her head, she felt something loosen from her body and mind, received the sensation that she was physically dissolving. She hated Michael for making them run, for the night and the killings and for her tiredness and hunger and the cottage that was burned and the death of her father. Images seemed to unwind her like a mummy, peel her like the layers of an onion.

  McBride sat staring at the Unteroffizier, who placed himself opposite the Irishman.

  "What do we do with them?" the young guard asked him.

  "Officer's business that," the Bavarian replied.

  "We're moving on in an hour—"

  Then our Irish friends will have to look after these." He studied McBride intently, his head slightly on one side, as if mentally fitting him with various items of clothing. He nodded, eventually. "You're not a farmer," he observed in English.

  "Drummond," McBride replied, "where is Drummond?" He asked the question in German, which seemed only to confirm something to the Bavarian. He shook his head.

  "Who is this Drummond? You are the ones in the field last night, nicht so?" Slowly, he leaned forward. "But you are not a farmer, my friend. You are Irish, uh?"

  "I'm Irish." McBride added no more, returning to an inward contemplation of Drummond where he could not be distracted by the trivialities of his capture. Nevertheless, when breakfast came he fell upon it hungrily, as if restoring necessary strength.

  As soon as he had finished, and Maureen and Gilliatt, too, were drinking tea from chipped mugs, the Bavarian said to the guard at the door whose MP40 had been on them all the time, "Go and tell the Herr Hauptmann we have some guests for him to entertain." The guard ducked out of the low door.

  "It's tonight, is it?" Gilliatt suddenly asked in German, lighting a cigarette he had cautiously taken from an inside pocket. The Unteroffizier was surprised, then he smiled.

  "It is tonight."

  "This will be one of the beaches, will it?" Gilliatt continued. "The U-boats will off-load onto Toe Head Bay. How many other beaches are there — can't be more than two thousand men, surely?" He puffed smoke at the ceiling. The Bavarian looked puzzled and angry, but snapped his mouth into a steel line without replying, almost feeling that he had given something valuable to the man who already knew so much about Smaragdenhalskette. "What's the operation called, by the way?" Gilliatt added.

  "Smaragdenhalskette," the Hauptmann said from the door. "I obviously do not need to translate into English, or Gaelic. You are neither Irish nor innocent bystanders, I see."

  "Emerald Necklace — yes, it would be," Gilliatt observed. "And the boys from Brest come ashore tonight, mm?"

  The Hauptmann appeared startled. His young face under the peaked cap seemed white and worried. "How do you—? You're guessing, of course."

  "What I know, the British government knows," Gilliatt observed, marvelling at the courage transmitted by three rashers of bacon, two fried eggs and a thick slice of white bread. He was helpless, just a wasp on a windscreen at whom the driver would occasionally flick, but on whom his mind might become increasingly, dangerously concentrated.

  "And what have they done with this so-called knowledge?" the captain sneered, moving closer. The old woman seemed to have melted into the flagstones.

  "Ah, now I couldn't possibly tell you that. I've been on holiday in Ireland for the last few days. But, I was on the minesweeper that found your precious channel through our minefield—" Gilliatt left the revelation floating on the air until it descended by its own weight. He smiled, and drawing on his cigarette leaned further back in his chair. McBride was watching him carefully. Maureen touched his arm as she saw the captain's face darken.

  "When, eh? When did you find it?" the captain asked, dispensing with any pretence, hungry for the information.

  "Oh, one day last week," Gilliatt observed blithely.

  "Get the Herr Oberst on the radio," the captain snapped at the Bavarian sergeant, who immediately stood up. "Tell the Herr Oberst what this Englishman knows, and ask what is to be done with him." The second half of the sentence seemed to come as relief and inspiration to both the captain and his sergeant. Confidence returned at once.

  Gilliatt quailed inwardly, as if from some electricity that might have passed from Maureen to himself through the hand that still lay on his arm. He was a wasp, and he had just buzzed against the windscreen again. He wondered what they would do with him, and prayed that the British government was doing something. A pressing futility was as physical as a pain behind his eyes, but he rubbed at his forehead to rid himself of it. Be a wasp, he thought. Just do your little bit—

  October 198-

  Walsingham had reluctantly agreed to accept Guthrie's invitation to lunch at his Georgian house set in three acres of gardens and paddock, through which a trout stream ran, on the Wiltshire-Hampshire border. Guthrie had decided to spend the weekend with his wife, Marian, at his country home rather than in London. Walsingham was driven down in time for lunch on the Saturday and, as the Daimler turned into the drive of Guthrie's home, he was aware at once of the overt security that surrounded the Minister's person, family, and house. Soldiers, supplemented by police dog-handlers, were evident through the trees across the sunlit paddock and lawns, moving in pairs.

  Guthrie, casual in sweater and slacks and looking ten years younger than his age, was waiting for him on the steps of the house as the Daimler came to a noisy halt on the gravel drive. Guthrie came towards him, hand extended. The warmth of the handshake seemed to require response, seek comfort. Guthrie's eyes, as if scales of confidence had dropped from them, been surgically removed by the bright autumnal sunlight, were darting, nervous, worried. Walsingham, as he was ushered into the
spacious hall of the house and his light overcoat taken from him by the assiduous Guthrie, merely confirmed with a nod that McBride was to be removed from the board. Guthrie, at the desired signal, appeared instantly more affable, relaxed. He took Walsingham into the drawing-room and introduced hmi to his younger, still-beautiful Eurasian wife. He'd married her before he'd entered politics in the election of 1951, while he was still serving with the Royal Navy in the Far East. She was lithe, gracious, able to put men at their ease without ever inviting more than their conversation. Guthrie poured the drinks.

  The telephone call from Walsingham's office came while they were still eating the hors d" oeuvre, smoked chicken served with an avocado mousse and a slightly chilled white Burgundy. Walsingham took the call in Guthrie's study, which overlooked the extensive gardens at the back of the house. Two soldiers were talking to a police dog-handler on the terrace outside, but they disturbed Walsingham rather than reassured him. But the feeling was vague and obscure, and was dismissed as soon as Exton started speaking.

  "Ryan is dead? Walsingham repeated bemusedly. The sun obviously did not enter this room until late afternoon, and the study felt chilly. Walsingham lowered himself gingerly onto the edge of Guthrie's walnut desk and fiddled immediately with the gold pen resting near the blotter. He did not, however, make any notes. "How?"

  "Shot twice at point-blank range, through the head—"

  "Wait, when was this?" Walsingham felt an urgency pluck at him.

  "His body was found a couple of hours ago."

  "Where?"

  "Behind a multi-storey car park in Eastbourne. It had been thrown from one of the upper floors, but he was dead before that. The pathologist's report suggests yesterday afternoon or early evening — which is why we didn't hear from him last night."