Craig Thomas (writing as David Grant)
Emerald Decision
A British agent uncovers a secret nest of Nazi submarines, German agents mysteriously multiply in Ireland and a massive Nazi prachute drop is imminent somewhere in Britain. This is the background for Craig Thomas's exciting story of a secret action so lethal and unorthodox that all traces of it were instantly obliterated until a top American author after the war sought information for a new novel and during the course of his research uncovered the mystery of his father.
Emerald Decision is the second of two novels written by David Grant. Perhaps it wasn't published under the name Craig Thomas as it didn't include any of the recurring characters which he'd established in the first four books.
Or perhaps it's because there isn't an animal in the title.
In fact we get two books in one. Both stories unfold together and in some places cleverly mirror each other's action. In 1940 an Anglo-Irish spy called McBride is uncovering German U-Boats and agents in the South of Ireland. In 1980 his American son is doing research for his latest in a string of popular history books. Were the Germans preparing to invade Ireland? For both men there are those who would rather the truth remained uncovered.
This book remained out of print until 1987 when Collins started to publish Thomas' books starting with Winter Hawk. Their paperback imprint, Fontana, had previously published Emerald Decision so now a revised edition appeared with the name Craig Thomas prominently displayed. Changes inside mainly involved the changing of the date 'October 1980' to 'October 198-' and references to the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement were inserted to make things more topical.
Dedicated to:
for MY FATHER, who talked of the minefield that led to the decision and In Memoriam E.R.D. and.B.B. Friends
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my thanks to my father, Bryn Thomas, a former minesweeping officer, for his invaluable assistance during the writing of this book. It was his wartime recollections that prompted the story of the novel, and his expertise that contributed in no small measure to the descriptions of naval activity. Also, my gratitude to Wilfrid and Ada White, my wife's parents, for their memories of the Blitz in London.
Of the numerous texts consulted during the period of research for the book, I would like to mention in particular Roskill's
My thanks, and affection, to Simon King for his enthusiasm for the project.
PART ONE
Ancient History
CHAPTER ONE
A Visit to the Oberst
McBride had spoken to many former Wehrmacht officers, all of them reduced to scribbled private shorthand in his notebooks, or become disembodied voices on cassette tapes. Yet Menschler was different, if only in that he was more intensely reminiscent of a former self than the others. He was different, and not merely because he was blind; the lines of visible scar-tissue were like pointing accusations, perspective lines drawn to the dead eyes. Menschler was complete in another way, in the entirety with which he chose to inhabit the past, to walk corridors long disused — even the final corridors of the Fuhrerbunker. His almost total recall promised well for McBride, chilling and fascinating him as they sat in the blind man's living-room in the wooden house on Norderney, in the East Frisians.
McBride was seated facing the window, perhaps two or three yards from the desk where Menschler sat, his back to the window and its square of grey sky and choppy sea nibbling at the stretch of beach below the house. The house had seemed an outpost as he had approached it on foot along the beach road. It was a summer house — Menschler lived there all year, and had done since the early 1950s, when his prison sentence was commuted by a West German court. It seemed to McBride that he had chosen this flat, windy splinter of the Bundesrepublik out of a total disapproval of post-war Germany. Hermitage, or place of exile.
The furniture in this main room was old, heavy, dark. Polished by his caresses rather than by creams or waxes. Even the way in which Menschler gripped the arms of his chair at that moment suggested both possession and defiance. And he had the trick of looking directly at his visitor's face as he listened or spoke, and not in a vague direction over one of McBride's shoulders. His blind eyes seemed disconcertingly aware in the room and its fading early evening light.
McBride's thoughts pushed impatiently, nudging him into speech. For the moment, he resisted the temptation to broach the real subject of his visit, while Menschler spoke of the last days, when his Germany had gone up in flames with two bodies in the grounds of the Reichschancellery. McBride wished, half-attentively, that he had obtained Menschler's first-hand impressions for his previous book.
'The Fuhrer surrounded himself with SS trash in those last days—' They were speaking in German, a language in which the American, McBride, was fluent. The contempt, the hatred of the army's displacement by the SS was undimmed by the slow blind passage of forty years. 'Even while their glorious leader, with his bowel trouble and his belief in sorcery, was doing away with himself like a rat taking poison—'
Four days before, in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, McBride had found the most tangible reference to Emerald Necklace, in a private letter written by Menschler to his cousin, a Junker Generalleutnant on the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht staff in Berlin, whose papers had been bequeathed to the Koblenz archives on his death in the early '60s. And unlike the memories of other men to whom he had spoken, or the official records, there had been no OKW censorship or editing. A private letter which referred to a top-secret army matter had survived intact, been waiting for him at the end of a long and fruitless search for a proposed operation that had never received the usual
His book had begun as a sober treatise designed to enhance his academic status and reputation.
And he'd returned to his treatise, seeking to inject it with popular appeal, dynamism, something
