Emerald Decision

in his right hand. McBride launched himself as the German kicked open the cottage door and regained his balance. He caught the German in a tackle, wrapping his arms around the man, reaching with his hands for the gun. The German tried to tear free as they fell to the ground — the gun fired, then again, and again, deafening McBride, before he could get his hands on it.

The German pulled his right arm free of the tackle, tried to roll over, attempted to strike McBride across the face with his left forearm. McBride shifted his concentration to the German's face, hit down with his fist and made contact, knuckles against bared teeth, so that he knew there was no power, no effect. The German heaved up at him, turning his body, and McBride felt himself rolling off the German. He raised his body, struck again across the German's face with his forearm, immediately groping in the darkness for the hand that held the gun. His hearing was returning, he could hear his own breath and that of the German, roaring as they struggled on the wet ground.

A blow across the side of his head stunned him, but he reached up, his hand sliding across the smear of blood, and grabbed the gun barrel. He wrenched down, then away, hurting the German, freeing the gun. The German threw the rest of his weight off him, and got to his feet, reckless with the knowledge that McBride had the gun, secure in that he would be unlikely to kill, needing to interrogate him.

McBride wiped at his eyes with his left hand, fumbled the gun around with his right. When he could see again, there was the noise of heavy running footsteps. He fired off two hopeful shots in their direction as he knelt by the front door of the cottage, the blood seeping into his left eye again from the cut across his forehead. The footsteps diminished with distance, with undiminished pace. The German had got away.

McBride rubbed at the trickling blood again, cursing.

* * *

HMS Bisley was signalled to anchor off Milford Haven, and her crew, with the exception of the captain and first lieutenant, were to remain aboard. Gilliatt and Ashe went ashore in the minesweeper's motorboat, the grey water choppy across the half-mile to the dock-side. Gilliatt was huddled in his duffel-coat, hood pulled over his cap, arms thrust down into the deep pockets. He felt peculiarly uneasy, almost disorientated, like some prisoner being transported from one confinement to another. It was a localized feeling, one he sensed he had deliberately though subconsciously induced. It alleviated the pressure of Ashe's presence, his mood of inward shrinking. Ashe had the Admiralty plague of looming defeat, picked up in Whitehall. And Gilliatt knew that was where he was to proceed.

On the jetty waiting for them, impatient to help them from the motorboat, anxious and desperate to hear their expansion of the one brief coded message they had radioed to Milford, were two commanders from NOIC's HQ at Milford, Western Approaches Command, together with a captain Gilliatt did not recognize, and an armed escort. The prisoner analogy struck Gilliatt even more forcibly, but deeper anxieties broke through that surface. He could not shake off Ashe's gloomiest prognostications.

'We'll go straight to NOIC,' the captain informed them, assessing each of them swiftly then indicating the staff car with its driver. There was a jeep, too, for the escort. Gilliatt suddenly wanted to walk away from it all, get back in the motorboat and go on pretending that the war was winnable as long as he and others like him did their duty, carried out their allotted tasks.

He climbed into the back of the big Austin-next to Ashe, who smiled at him like an encouraging parent, as if Gilliatt were about to vanish round the dentist's door. The car pulled away immediately the captain got in next to the driver, hurrying out of the dock area as if towards some emergency. Milford was grey and drying after overnight rain, scoured by a cold wind that whistled outside the car windows. The captain in the front seat said nothing. The Austin pulled up the hill — Gilliatt resisted a valedictory look back at the low hull of Bisley slopping in the bay — and into the drive of the imposing house that had become NOIC's HQ for Milford.

The captain ushered them through the door, upstairs to what once had been a drawing-room but was now partitioned by board into three or four small offices with impossibly high ceilings and strips of green carpet that were off-cuts from other offices. Maps provided a temporary artwork, there was a paraffin heater for warmth, and a utility desk and chairs. One long window, which looked down towards the sound. Again, Gilliatt refused to acknowledge the image of Bisley. That, he knew with a sullen certainty, was part of the past already.

As if to confirm it, the captain's first words as he took their coats were to Gilliatt, and dropped heavy as stones.

'Admiralty Intelligence until a few years ago, Lieutenant?'

'Yes, sir.' The captain studied the tone for insolence, almost tasting it with a movement of his lips, then nodded, recognizing it as disappointment.

'Captain Ashe, if you would describe exactly what you encountered during your sweep of the suspect area?' The Intelligence captain sat down behind the desk, his bulk threatening it, the braid of office folded like handcuffs in front of him. Ashe told him.

'What did you do, Commander, after the first profound shock?'

Ashe looked at Gilliatt almost resentfully, as if to protest the unfairness of Gilliatt not having to answer the questions. Ashe appeared to Gilliatt to be reliving the experience. Shadows, forebodings, hovered round him. His captain had grown older in the passage of hours.

'We — I ordered the sweep to continue—' The captain raised his eyebrows, but nodded — 'then carried out our orders. I detached Bisley and we proceeded to check the channel that had already been swept.'

The captain's eyes seemed suddenly alert, demanding as those of an interrogator.

'Yes? How far did you proceed — what course?'

'An hour. The swept channel is at almost ninety degrees to the channel we were sweeping. I — did not think it necessary to proceed to the southern edge of the minefield to ascertain the full extent of the sweep that had been carried out—' Ashe was picking his way through a booby-trapped area of emotive words, smoothing all evocation from his voice.

'Go on.' The captain was childishly impatient for the climax of the story.

'The channel is almost a mile wide, and we estimate it runs from the southern edge of the minefield—' he began to pull a chart from his inside breast-pocket, unfolding it so that it crackled in the warm, temporary room. Gilliatt listened to a typewriter in one of the other partitioned cells of the drawing-room, and a saucer rattled in a cup. Ashe spread the chart, the minefield on it, a peppering of little red crosses. The captain leaned forward, touched it almost reverentially. Then Gilliatt saw it was nervousness like their own that made him hesitant.

Ashe continued, clearing his throat, 'Here it is — it runs north by east to south by west, from the coast at a point just east of Cork to the dog-leg here which marks the edge of the minefield—' Ashe's finger traced carefully, as if across the surface of a still-wet print. His finger moved down, and as if to stop him, the captain spoke.

'North to south — Ireland to France. Very well, gentlemen—' He looked at the chart again, at the hard black lines that denoted the discovered channel through Winston's Welcome Mat that Ashe had marked — a dotted line indicated the remaining area that Bisley had not searched. When Gilliatt studied his face, he saw that it was clenched tight around some indigestible fact or emotion. There was white along the line of the jaw, the lips were thinned and bloodless, the fine lines around the eyes had become creases. 'Gentlemen — the sooner all three of us get this to London, the better.'

* * *

As the D-class cruiser signalled each of the three merchantmen in turn to alter course on another leg of their zig-zag route, the noise of the U-boat spotter — a seaplane — overhead faded into the murk of the coming dusk and the rain-squall. It should have stayed with the convoy for another two hours, to the limit of its range, but the weather was already closing in on its Gander base, and unless it returned immediately it would be unable to land either at the airfield or on the lake. And it did not possess sufficient reserves of fuel to outfly the weather.

The noise of its engines disappeared behind the gale-force wind which flung great sheets of green-white spray against the superstructures of the four ships. They would be alone now, without escort or spotter planes, for fifteen hundred miles of the North Atlantic. Perversely, the bad weather was almost welcome. No U-boat could operate at periscope or torpedo depth in the troughs and peaks of the sea that was now running.

The three merchantmen altered course in turn, shepherded by the cruiser. Each man aboard assumed that, whatever his dreams demanded or envisaged, they were headed for the perilous North Channel and the Clyde or the