Emerald Decision

by Craig Thomas

  "Yes?" she said, then again, "Yes."

  "Good,change seats then."

  When she had done so, he stood looking at her, then simply nodded and headed up the track to the farmhouse on its knoll. The moonlight illuminated the path and the lawns and the white walls of Crosswinds Farm. He turned briefly and looked out to sea. Nothing. No activity. He closed his mind to all of that. It wasn't his concern.

  No one challenged him, and he knocked loudly on the front door, the assumption of innocence done deliberately, with care. After a while he knocked again and heard footsteps in the hall. Drummond opened the door. He seemed perturbed, but Gilliatt excused his expression — he was a stranger to Drummond, after all.

  "I'm Peter Gilliatt — sir. I was sent from London with Michael McBride."

  "Oh, God," Drummond breathed in an appalled voice that could have been guilt or sadness. "Come in — Lieutenant?" Gilliatt nodded. "Of course. I— you didn't come that night, there was shooting, but I knew Michael had to be alive, probably on the run — the Germans — he's in here—"

  Drummond opened the door to his study. McBride was lying comfortably and arranged and quite dead on the sofa in front of the fire. It was obvious that Drummond had been sitting opposite him, drinking. A bottle and a single glass stood on an occasional table next to the armchair. McBride's eyes were closed, his face seemed very peaceful. Gilliatt felt emotion churn in his stomach.

  "What happened?"

  "He — saved my life. He must have surprised the German unit hiding in the gardens—" Gilliatt looked at him narrowly. "Some of the parachute troops who landed yesterday night, I imagine. He came on them, I suppose. I heard shooting, but by the time I got my own gun, after warning London, it was all over. I found him near the door, dead, and three Germans dead in the gardens. I've seen no one since."

  Gilliatt said, "He came back to kill you."

  "I don't understand."

  "He thought you betrayed him — the other night, when we were ambushed. We saw you then—" He studied Drummond's face, but it was merely sorrowful, half-attentive. "He was convinced you'd betrayed us, you were working with the IRA for the Germans."

  "Poor Michael. He ended up saving my life." Drummond went forward into the room and stood over the body. Then he turned to Gilliatt. "I know this has been a terrible shock to you, Lieutenant Gilliatt, but have you anything to report? London is in a flap about these troops landing — my scouts have seen a few signs of them, but nothing more. Why are they here?"

  Gilliatt was staring at McBride's body, in valediction. The ultimate futility of courage, he could not help thinking. To die for an error, a stupid, bigoted mistake. He wondered what had possessed McBride—

  He looked up. Drummond, a senior naval officer, required his report. He nodded.

  "I think I'd better talk to London, sir. How much they're aware of I don't know, but it's urgent."

  "The radio's in the cellar— come."

  Both men paused at the door to look back once at McBride. Then Drummond closed the door on the body, and Gilliatt decided that Maureen could remain in the car until he had made his report to London. He postponed sorrow until he had done his urgent duty.

  As he waited for Drummond to unlock the door to the cellar, the hall window was suddenly illuminated by a garish orange glow from the sea.

  * * *

  Fitzgerald was awoken — thrust into consciousness — by the first explosion. He was tumbled from his bunk, and his head banged painfully against the bulkhead. His vision became foggy, and the weak blue light in his cabin became sinister and frightening. He scrabbled with his hands as the whole cabin lurched sideways, spilling forward, disorientating him and making him suddenly aware of the cold water of the St George's Channel beneath the ship. The cruiser was suddenly made of paper, easily crumpled.

  A second explosion, banging his shoulder against the bulkhead, rolling him along the wall of the cabin — along the wain. He groaned from fear rather than pain. The blue light was extinguished, and he was in complete, cold darkness. He called out, to hear his own voice. The cruiser was listing more. Footsteps outside, drumming through the bulkhead, men cursing. Dryness still beneath his hands and knees. His genitals were chilly with anticipation of the creeping, drowning water he knew must come for him. The shudder of a more distant explosion.

  Blood seeped into his left eye. He wiped roughly at it like an embarrassing tear. His body was shivering, as if registering all three explosions. His mind was clear, but could not react. He knew they were under attack, even understood that the cruiser was sinking, but there seemed no urgency. Panic was still, sedative, calming.

  It was some minutes — it seemed minutes, perhaps longer, perhaps only moments? — before he felt terror return, unfreezing the icy calm. He scrambled to his feet, against the sloping bulkhead, seeming alone in the silent, dark ship, and reached for the door handle. He turned it, and pulled.

  The door did not move. He heaved at the handle, but the door remained wedged and buckled into place by the effect of the two explosions.

  He heard a siren, but could not be certain because he was screaming by that time and what he heard might have been the sound of his own demented voice. Siren — voice — hands banging on the door. The useless noises went on for some time, even after the cabin tilted forward. He heard the slither towards and past him of clothes and toilet gear and framed pictures of his wife and family and papers and the books he had been reading, then they stilled into an unseen heap against the forward bulkhead. Eventually, he had to grip the door handle with one hand to keep himself sufficiently upright to pound with increasing, weakening hopelessness on the cabin door. His voice had gone by that time, and it seemed the ship's siren was screaming for him.

  All his awareness seemed to be in his bare feet and ankles, awaiting the arrival of the icy water that he somehow knew was already reaching through the cruiser towards him.

  * * *

  Churchill seemed to have acquired the company of Walsingham more exclusively than any other officer present. None of them would openly demonstrate their hostility to the Prime Minister, but they had overtly avoided Walsingham since the moment Churchill announced his decision regarding the convoy. It was as if they knew the authorship of Emerald. They may have done, but Walsingham, though he disliked the proximity of the Prime Minister because it so clearly marked him off physically from his companions, could not be disturbed by their animosity. He was bound to Churchill, Emerald would be with him for the remainder of his life — but he was beyond regretting that now. It was done, or soon would be when the report came in, and it would have either to be lived down or lived up to in the coming years and after the war.

  If it was not buried efficiently by the Prime Minister— Churchill's face was blank of expression. He had drunk a good deal during the night, alternating alcohol with amounts of coffee, but he did not appear drunk so much as having slipped away from himself and from any pressure or guilts that might assail him. He seemed curiously at peace.

  A telephone rang, and it was answered by a Wren. She carried the set over to Churchill.

  "The Tracking Room upstairs is receiving morse from the convoy, sir."

  Churchill roused himself, the face closed up around the suddenly alert eyes. The other occupants of the room stopped work, watched Churchill's broad back as he leaned over the telephone.

  "Yes?"

  "Prime Minister, we're getting reports that the convoy is under U-boat attack—"

  "What is the convoy's position?"

  "That's what's strange, sir. They're well into our new — channel, they should be safe from attack."

  "You mean the U-boats are in our channel?" Churchill exploded. The intelligence colonel's face behind him wrinkled with contempt and self-disgust, and he looked up at the wall map and the marked position of the convoy.

  "It must be, sir! Sir, two of the merchant ships have been hit by torpedoes, and the cruiser—!"

  "My God—"

  "The cruiser i
s signaling abandon ship, sir—"

  "You know what to do. We must save as many as we can. Report to me every half-hour."

  Churchill put down the telephone. Only the few people in this operations room, Walsingham thought, know the truth about Emerald. They will not be allowed to tell the truth. No one will ever know. Churchill's face was blank of all expression. He put the receiver down on the floor beside his chair. Less than two minutes, Walsingham thought, suddenly and briefly appalled, was all the time that was necessary. Upstairs, they would already be saying how shocked and moved the old man was, how terrible after the secrecy of the southern route through the minefield, even as they began the attempt to rescue the survivors. The subterranean reality in this cramped bunker room was different, but now it was robbed, somehow, of real significance. Voices on the telephone, an awaited radio report from an RAF Anson of Coastal Command, and that was how it was done. No blood anywhere near this room.

  "Colonel," Churchill called.

  "Sir." The colonel was standing in front of Churchill, his back deliberately to Walsingham, in calculated insult.

  "You understand, Colonel? A tragic fact of war — we have lost a cruiser, three heavy merchantmen and God knows how many men — by U-boat attack." The colonel nodded, his face transferring guilt to the old man in the chair, adopting the fixed lines of unthinking duty, the clear brow of necessity. Churchill could see it happening to him, and was satisfied. "I will inform the American Ambassador in due course. That will be all, Colonel."

  "Prime Minister." The colonel walked away with almost light step. Churchill studied Walsingham, as if the expression on his face was of the utmost importance, just at that moment. Walsingham understood from the nod he was given that the Prime Minister was satisfied. To Walsingham, the satisfaction was a recognition of something failed or broken or missing within himself. But he dismissed the thought.

  Churchill closed his eyes for a moment, as soon as Walsingham returned his gaze to the wall charts. In a sudden, clear, visionary moment, he could hear insects in the garden at Chartwell. All those years, well spent, recollected with affection, had only been an interlude. His destiny was to be the only man capable of making decisions like Emerald. That was why his country needed him, he acknowledged. Not for the V-sign, or the cigars, or the bulldog expression or the black homburg. Because he could make decisions like Emerald and not despair of himself, of his country, or of human nature. It was not having the courage, or even the ruthlessness, to do it that mattered. It was the ability to perceive necessity, to bow to that strange deity's commands.

  "Sir," the radio operator called from the other side of the room. "I'm beginning to get a transmission." The colonel moved to the radio, and Walsingham got to his feet. Churchill nodded his permission, but made no attempt to move himself. The volume on the radio was turned up, and the voice of the distant R/T operator aboard the Anson could be heard through a mush of static, stung and obscured occasionally by severe crackling.

  Walsingham stood next to the colonel behind the radio operator. The army officer looked at him, and there was complicity in his features. A complicity of duty and transferred guilt and personal innocence. Walsingham nodded to him. The colonel seemed relieved. The authorship of Emerald did not matter. The old man in the chair had committed the atrocity.

  "We've sighted the U-boats on the surface, but we're flying low and keeping out of sight." The absence of jargon and the hesitancy of the words indicated that the radio operator knew he was being listened to by Churchill. No code-names, no call-signs, no references to position, just a voice on the ether, a radio commentary of an occurrence at sea. There was silence for a long time, in which only the universe spoke, then: "There's been an explosion, no, two explosions — we're going for a look-see." Another long silence in which each person in the room became less and less aware of the drama and significance of events and more sensible of minor irritations, hunger, a dry mouth, itching eyebrows. The outcome of the war, the fate of Smaragdenhalskette diminished, faded until they could cope with it as a voice commentating on distant events, a race or a Test Match. "Two U-boats have been damaged, and another two are sinking!" Spithead Review commentary, a fireworks display. "The remainder have altered course — there goes another one! There are hundreds of men in the water we can see — one of the damaged U-boats is rolling — she's going!"

  "Acknowledge, and switch off!" Churchill barked from his chair, and the colonel turned the volume down almost to inaudibility. He was puzzled by the old man's behavior — he seemed to care more for the fate of the Germans than the convoy crews.

  The room returned to insulated silence, and then a telephone rang. It was the receiver still at Churchill's feet. He picked it up warily as he might have done a snake.

  "It's the Irish Ambassador, sir."

  "What does he want? I'm very busy. Let me call him later, unless it's urgent."

  "He wishes to speak to you under code-name Essex." Churchill paused — the Earl of Essex and his invasion of Ireland in the last years of Elizabeth's reign. The first convoyed British soldiers had landed in Cork. "No, that isn't urgent. I'll call him later, my dear. Give him my thanks."

  He put down the telephone, heavily and clumsily. Then he lay back in the armchair, fat and helpless as an overfed baby. Walsingham felt himself to be impossibly removed from Churchill, and desperate to renounce everything to do with Emerald. Unlike the colonel, he could not completely and successfully transfer guilt to the corpulent figure of Churchill. He was still the author of the file.

  Churchill was looking intently at him. Then he said, softly, "Bury it, Commander. Bury it deep. You can begin tomorrow."

  October 198-

  McBride placed his coins on the flat top of the call-box. The telephone was still clammy from use by the woman in front of him, and he wiped it on the sleeve of his jacket. Andoversford was quiet in the early morning. He dialed the Cheltenham number he had used from Cavendish House the previous day.

  "Come on, come on—" murmured some impatient part of him, though he felt calm, assured, even bright, despite his almost sleepless night in the small residential restaurant on Cleeve Hill above the orange, serried lights of Cheltenham and the sky-glow of Gloucester in the distance. He'd eaten well, drunk most of a bottle of claret, then retired to his room to type two letters, one to his agent in New York and the other, longer one, to his bank in Portland. He had carbon copies of both letters in the car now.

  "Yes, Professor McBride? I trust you slept well?" Walsingham sounded confident, gracious in victory — and as if he was acting a part.

  "I want to talk to you."

  "Of course. Will you come here?"

  "Said the spider to the fly, uh? No thanks."

  Walsingham chuckled, but there was a newly cautious note in his voice when he replied. "Of course. Where do you suggest?"

  "Somewhere lonely might be nice — for you. However, if you want to shoot me dead you'll do it in the middle of London and get away with it."

  I'm glad you understand that."

  "Let's say Foxcote Hill, in an hour. See you." McBride put down the receiver. He stepped out of the call-box, and climbed into his car.

  He drove out of Andoversford, taking minor roads until he was able, using the OS map, to approach Foxcote Hill from the south. He parked the car at the end of a track which petered out in the copse on Shill Hill, and then climbed until he was above the surrounding countryside. It was misty and autumnal in the fields, and the copses were webbed with mist. In the distance to the north, he could see the village he had left twenty minutes or so earlier, and its main roads. Trees covered the northern slopes of the hill, but he was on short, springy turf, exposed and alone. He descended into the trees again and waited. The morning was still, heavy, but the cloud was thin and transitory.

  During the night he had come to the conclusion that Walsingham would let him live — just so long as he knew that the evidence for what had happened in 1940 was in hands other than McBride's alone. Whether
he would ask questions first, and so elicit his powerlessness, was another matter. McBride had never possessed a gun, and he could not regret the absence of one now. Nevertheless, during the fifteen or twenty slow minutes before he heard the car approaching from the tiny hamlet of Foxcote to the north, he began to wish for the feel of one in his hand, futile though its possession would have been.

  He ground out his third cigarette as he heard the undergrowth move and brush against a body, and slipped back into the shadow of the tree bole against which he had been leaning. A minute later, Walsingham appeared, struggling up the slope, his trilby hat in his hand, his topcoat unbuttoned. He appeared to be alone. He stopped for breath, dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief, felt his pounding heart, and called out.

  "McBride — McBride, are you here?"

  McBride said nothing. Walsingham looked back behind him, then moved on up the last of the slope to the hilltop, passing the tree that concealed McBride. McBride watched the hill below him, straining to see into the shadows beneath the trees, and listened intently. He could see and hear nothing.

  Without moving from the shelter of the tree, he called out after Walsingham, "Don't turn around for the moment, Walsingham. Are you alone?"

  Walsingham stopped. "Of course."

  "I believe you. I didn't think you'd want our little talk to be overheard. I guess national security covers it, uh?" He heard Walsingham chuckle. "OK, turn around." McBride stepped out from behind the tree. Walsingham was dabbing his brow again. He looked old and vulnerable. "Where's the hit man?"

  Walsingham raised his hands, palms outwards in innocence. "My dear fellow—"

  "Bullshit." McBride stood higher on the slope than Walsingham. "Let's make it so he has to be a very good shot."

  "I'd like to sit down." Walsingham did not appear more ruffled than simply breathless with the short climb. "Over there? You can watch the trees, surely. And I'm not wired for sound, nor am I armed." He held his coat open, and McBride frisked him quickly. Walsingham was aware of the slight tremor through his old body as the American's hands smoothed over his sides and chest, down his legs, between his thighs, around his ankles. Then McBride looked up at him, and the gleam of confidence in his eyes demonstrated that he had sensed the older man's fear.