Emerald Decision

'The helmsman's a German spy — aren't you, Campbell?'

'Sir — Glasgow branch,' the helmsman replied without turning his head.

St Anne's Head slid alongside them as they passed down the west channel. Gilliatt looked once at McBride, and nodded.

'Excuse me, sir, the captain wants me. Good luck,' he added in a quieter voice. McBride saw a moment of envy, a reassertion of satisfaction, and smiled.

'Rather you than me,' he offered, indicating the bridge of the minesweeper with a traversing gaze.

Gilliatt went below. The curtain was across the captain's door. He knocked on the bulkhead.

'Come in, Peter.'

Gilliatt entered. The flotilla commander, Captain James Ashe, nodded, returned his gaze immediately to the papers on his folding desk.

'Close the door, Peter,' he said. Gilliatt closed the door of the tiny, cramped cabin. 'Find a seat — you may need it.' Gilliatt's face retained the grin of ignorance. Ashe looked set, determined. Secretive. Gilliatt glanced at the Admiralty chart held open on the desk. A spread-legged compass lay across the St George's Channel, its dog-leg minefield marked in red — officially laid in July 1940. When Ashe picked up the compass, and tapped at the minefield, close in to the coast of Ireland, Gilliatt felt a sudden, inexplicable pluck of nervousness. He even wondered for a moment whether the presence of McBride had been somehow explained to him — then dismissed the idea.

'Bloody minefield's only been there just over four months,' Ashe grumbled, as if deploring impermanence, shoddy workmanship.

'What is it, sir?'

'We are on a special job, Peter. What we are going to do is to sweep a thousand-yard passage through the St George's Channel minefield — Winston's Welcome Mat, as they call it in the Admiralty.'

Gilliatt was stunned. The minefield ran in a huge dog-leg from the Eire coast to that of north Cornwall. It followed the coast from Carnsore Point south of Wexford to the Old Head of Kinsale, west of Cork, and ran along the Cornish coast from Hartland Point on the southern arm of Barnstaple Bay to Trevose Head beyond Padstow. It protected the St George's Channel, the Irish Sea, the Bristol Channel from enemy ships and submarines, and the coasts of Ireland, Wales and Cornwall and Devon from enemy invasion. It was — with the development of radar, RAF Fighter Command, British escort vessels and the American convoys — more than anything else responsible for the survival of Britain into the hard winter of 1940.

'Sir — why?' Gilliatt waved his hands loosely, at a loss to explain the orders to himself, disqualified from comment upon them.

'Ah, I presume their Lordships felt called upon to give a reason — in case we refused to carry out the order on the grounds of its insanity!' Ashe could not quite conceal his sense of satisfaction at being privy, as a mere flotilla commander, to Admiralty thinking and strategy. 'They're not ready to let the German Navy come sailing up the Bristol Channel—' His laughter barked like a gruff hound in his throat.

'Thank God for that,' Gilliatt breathed, staring at the red-marked minefield lying across the chart like a peppering of attendance marks on a school register.

'A convoy is on its way from Halifax—' Gilliatt looked up. 'Nothing special — except for the fact that it's three big merchantmen and a single cruiser escort. Its route is special — it's ignoring the North Channel and the Irish Sea and coming by the southern route — the one we'll open for it.'

'What—?'

'It's the loss of ships — over a hundred last month—' Again, Gilliatt appeared stunned, and a shadow passed across his features, an uneasiness as if ground beneath his feet had become treacherous marsh.

'That many?'

'That many — and more expected this month. By January, I don't think we could go on.' Ashe's face was stiff with feeling, each line carved. This was a conclusion of his own, rather than something he had been told. Gilliatt realized that his captain had been shunted out of his natural habitat into a place which reeked of power, and of impotence and despair. He shuddered, because in Ashe's face he could see the Admiralty staring out. 'Certainly February — more U-boats all the time, whole packs of them waiting out in the Atlantic, clustering round the coast of Ulster, as the convoys funnel into the North Channel — hopeless.'

'And — this is the answer'?'

'They hope so — it's an experiment, a new operation on a dying patient, Peter. A narrow passage, marked, through Winston's Welcome Mat for a few ships sailing line astern — they'll have run a fast zig- zag across the Atlantic, slip through as near the coast of Ireland as they dare, into Swansea, Cardiff or Bristol.'

'Can it be done?'

'Dammit, it's got to be done. If it works, then it can work again and again.'

'Until the Germans get wind of it, catch on—'

'But they'll have half their U-boats to the north, half to the south. We could still hang on, with the odds rearranged like that—'

Ashe seemed to be telling himself, convincing an invisible audience. Gilliatt remembered he was from a moneyed family, and there was a cousin high up in the Admiralty. What he was hearing was a private conversation rather than a briefing or a digest of sailing orders. Ashe had been put in the picture, and wanted to retreat from it, or share it so that it was not so immense a burden. He hadn't wanted to join the club, be in the know — if the knowledge was close to despair.

Gilliatt recognized his own reluctance to digest what he heard; even his own attitude to desk-work, to Intelligence. Perhaps he had wanted to be at sea, in the lower echelons where no one carried responsibility for more than his own ship, his own men.

The air seemed hot, constricting, in the small cabin..

'Close to the three-mile limit, and they'd be in sight of land all the way, and on the unexpected wing of the minefield, not down near Cornwall — any ships could make a course alteration at the last minute, outpace the U- boats—' Ashe was speaking more softly now, calmer. Making sense of his orders, limiting their implications.

'A thousand-yard channel, dan-buoyed, all the way from Carnsore to Old Head?' Gilliatt asked.

Ashe nodded. Looked up, his eyes clearing, his face less firmly, more habitually set; familiar lines, familiar strength.

'That's it, Peter. Another sweeping operation.'

'What about that McBride chap?'

Ashe shook his head. 'We'll transfer him to the spare sweeper, they can drop him off inshore of the minefield. He has nothing to do with us.'

'Lucky for him.'

'My cousin told me how vital all this was for the war effort — et cetera,' Ashe said, standing up for the first time, his big knuckles resting on the chart — directly on Kinsale and County Cork. 'I could hardly tell him I didn't want to know we had our backs absolutely to the wall, could I? That I didn't want to know we might be going down the bloody sink at any moment!' Ashe was growling now, but he patted Gilliatt on the shoulder. 'Sorry to let you in on it, Peter. I'm afraid I couldn't carry it around inside me any longer—' His eyes became inward-looking, filmed. 'They're all drifting round the Admiralty with grey faces, Peter.'

'It's all right, sir, thank you for telling me.'

'Polite — but you don't mean it.'

'No, sir, perhaps not. We're hanging by the merest thread, it looks like. Not a pleasant thought—'

Ashe seemed guilty at having burdened Gilliatt, yet there was also relief, the shoulders were straighter.

'God,' he said, as if in consolation, 'we may already be beaten, Peter — do you think it could be true?'

'I hope it's not, sir. I hope to God it's not true.'

* * *

Both men seemed to have agreed, unspokenly, that to remain in the commodore's offices in the Admiralty building in Whitehall was too covert, too removed from the battered London around them which now, indirectly but more urgently than ever, concerned them.

Walsingham had gained an interview with the Director of Minesweeping as soon as he returned to London from the house outside Southampton. The smudge of the city had been visible to him, hanging like a pall against a