movement, moving too quickly for slow German minds and slower hierarchy of action.
Ten minutes later, he halted once more. At the crossroad ahead, there was a German patrol, and a couple of arc lamps. Pub, tram sheds, bus garage. He could see the street plan of St Peter Port with vivid clarity, almost perceive his own route as a dotted line traced on it — much more clearly than the muzzy aerial pictures that had sent him here. Long low sheds erected in the strongly-fortified Albert Marina, intended to conceal as well as protect. Like submarine pens, the briefing officer had observed unnecessarily.
He worked his way behind the pub, where thin edges of light framed the blacked-out windows, paused to listen to the noises of a German song, tossed his head in amusement and in the superiority of moving secretively past, crossed Grand Bouet in a long-striding spring, and ducked down in the shelter of a hedge. Moving through a changed but still somehow pre-war suburbia on a holiday island. The bus garage was patrolled, but minimally.
He kept to the shadows of the buildings, listening with satisfaction to the silence of his passage. He climbed a rickety fence out onto First Tower Lane, took a fenced, grassy lane through to the Rue du Commerce, and rejoined Les Banques, now the esplanade.
Anti-aircraft guns pointed north, sandbagged against the sea-wall, incongruous opposite the boarding- houses which were mostly now billets. He began to walk openly, hands in pockets, humming softly. Dock worker, curfew permit and ID card in his breast-pocket, walking to join the night shift. He passed the first AA emplacement, and nobody took any notice. Coarse Berliner dance-band music floated occasionally to him on the wind. He skipped in time to it once or twice, because he was enjoying himself and the small part of his personal life which his pregnant wife occupied was dormant for the duration of any job they sent him on.
Along St George's Esplanade — he recited the names on the pre-war map, aware of the imposed German names, feeling the excitement curling like a drink in his stomach, or a cat contented to be warm and asking no more. The AA emplacement on the Salerie was betraying light, and the smell of cooking. Something with onions. A truck with a canvas hood was parked alongside the sandbags and the hut. Someone laughed, and he heard in a side-street a bus cough into life. Workmen's bus, heading for the harbour, then he was on Glategny Esplanade running along the north beach.
There was a barrier and guards at the crossroads. Other workmen by this time, and the checking of papers more perfunctory, as he had expected. He would have been more interesting to the patrol near the pub, coming from outside the town. Now, he was part of the nightly traffic to the harbour, and he joined the little queue of islanders and Frenchmen who had descended from a bus. Inevitably, someone spat in the brave darkness after a guard had passed, machine-pistol slung at the ready, boots splashing in the rain. McBride watched the men in front of him, and the manner in which their papers were checked by the officer in the Kriegsmarine greatcoat and the 'Security' tabs at collar and armband, and felt an intenser excitement. The guards were from no special unit, but they were alert, bristling with guns and purpose — the kind of charade McBride knew was habitual and which replaced real security when it passed into uneventful routine. The body-searches on the way off-shift would be thorough, but he would take nothing away.
He came level with the officer, adopted a careless, indifferent silence, and his papers were passed immediately. He had not even considered that they might be spotted as fakes, or betray him by an error. Some other part of the organism had shifted him half a yard closer to the nearest soldier, taken in his youth, his build, and the ease with which the machine-pistol would come away from his hands. McBride did things for his own survival without caring, with a thorough instinct.
He was waved through the barrier, which swung aside, and kept a couple of steps behind the two men in front of him down the North Esplanade, past the Victoria Marina, then through another barrier onto the Albert Pier. Here, there were more guards — the tabs of a special security unit clear in the white arc lights, the Kriegsmarine officers more numerous, the check more thorough, longer. He passed through, and dismissed the tension that had knotted suddenly in his stomach. The long, low sheds were ahead of him, each one marking a berth or berths. Closed doors, noises from within, lights slitting beneath doors, bursting from cracked windows or torn black-outs. Fuzzy aerial pictures.
He looked around him, slowing his pace so that the men ahead of him increased their distance. The man behind him was catching up. McBride slipped on the wet concrete, cursed in French, and rubbed his ankle under his boot.
'Hurt?' the man enquired as he drew level. McBride shook his head, swore and blamed the Germans for the weather, and the man walked on, laughing. McBride looked back at the barrier, lights fuzzy in the rain, and then slipped into the shadow of a warehouse. The sheds were fifty yards from him. He watched as a judas-door opened to admit the men who had been in front of him — the clatter of repair, bright leap of welding sparks, then the door closed. There was an armed guard there, too. McBride rubbed his hands, not entirely to keep warm, and began to wait.
Three in the morning. He was stiff with cold, and the single draught of rum had traced a slow, leaky passage like warm snow down his gullet, dissipated and might never have been. He had concealed himself between two of the coal-bunkers near the warehouse, at the end of the narrow-gauge track for the steam-crane which unloaded the coal Guernsey still imported for coal-burning coastal vessels. Like switched-off machinery, he had waited. Now, in the tired small hours, it was time to move. The cold was stiffening, annoying, but bearable because it was one of the conditions of the job, like his false papers and the swift row on the incoming rough tide from the slippery deck of the submarine. He was wearing three thick sweaters, long Johns, two pairs of trousers — what did he expect?
He stamped his feet, slapped his arms, shuffled and blew, then moved along the wall of the warehouse — once hearing a rat scurry on the other side of the corrugated iron as he paused. The rain was falling almost vertically since the wind had dropped as he carefully emerged onto the pier again. He studied the terrain like an animal, then ran. His boots began what seemed a hideous noise, his breath roared in his ears as if he were unfit and exhausted, then he was in the shadow of the first low shed — a hundred and fifty yards long, he estimated. The noises of repair and service dinned through the corrugated wall as he pressed his cheek against it. Vibration quivered. He paused only for a moment. He had selected the window he wanted, and moved swiftly. He had declared his presence — a line of bootprints in the mud from warehouse to shed — to any patrol. They moved around the pier frequently, but he expected laxity this late in the night. He had perhaps fifteen minutes.
He moved along the side of the shed. The windows were high up near the sloping edge of the roof, for ventilation more than light. Pricks of light came from most of them. The ladder was at the seaward end of the shed.
He climbed quickly and silently, up into the wind that had changed its mind and sprung back. The handholds were icily wet. He paused at the top, surveyed the area around him. Guards tended to huddle round fires in huts, but he wanted to be certain. Nothing moving. He eased himself onto the roof, and moved in a waddling crouch along its edge. It took him whole minutes to reach the window he had selected, but he did not slip once, holding his feet as he moved them against the bolts that fixed the roof to the walls, resting his heels in the corrugations. His thighs and the backs of his legs ached when he reached his goal. Here, he tested the roofs edge, and the guttering, took firm hold with his now unmittened hands, the cold of the iron a shock that ran in a shudder through his system — then lowered his body over the edge of the roof so that he hung against the window, the weight of clothing and boots sudden and painful in his shoulders and arms.
The tear in the black-out cloth was thin, and long. He shuffled his handhold until he could lean in against the dirty glass, and see—
The submarine being worked on almost directly below him was a bloody mess, there was no doubt about that; only amazement that it had limped back for repairs. Most of the crewmen in the forward section of the hull must have died, or been badly torn up. The bow bulged open like a crusted sore, and the deck-plates had been shuffled like untidy cards. McBride estimated that the sub had lost ten or twelve feet of its bow.
A big U-boat, and another beyond it, being checked over for plate-wear, hull-strain. Two of the biggest class of German U-boat, men hurrying about them. If each shed contained even one, then there was a pack of ten here —
These boats were either 'milchcow' refuelling subs, or they were long-trip, ocean-going boats, designed to
