Emerald Decision

weight dragged it over the edge of the wall. He waited, freezing, while Claude hauled it in, looped it, then threw again. The rope landed like a heavy, arresting hand across McBride's shoulder and he grabbed it tightly, then dragged it to the nearest mooring-ring, looping it through and making it fast.

When they had bow and stern lines fast the smack wallowed only gently in the lee of the wall, the line of old car-tyres down its port side rhythmically rubbing against the concrete of the wall. Perros looked up at him through the screen of the wheelhouse, and waved him to hurry. Engine repairs was the fiction of their need to tie up, but any patrol vessel that found them would tow them away from the sensitive area of the U-boat pens.

McBride crossed to the inner lip of the breakwater, looking into the streaming sleet blowing the length of the massive harbour. The huge breakwater had been built at the end of the century parallel with the beach to enclose a huge harbour, and the port of Lanilon on the western outskirts of Brest was developed. When France had fallen in the middle of 1940, the Germans had almost immediately begun the building of the concrete submarine pens for their U-boats, from which the raiders put out into the North Atlantic to intercept the convoys from neutral America and Canada to a desperate Britain.

McBride could see, away to his left as he stood on the final section of the breakwater wall and almost a couple of hundred yards from the shoreline and the port, the crude concrete bunkers under which huddled, as if against the storm rather than an air raid, the lines of U-boats. He could dimly make out the stern-on shapes of perhaps a dozen vessels undergoing refuelling, refits, repairs, rearming. The tunnels of the separate pens offered themselves to the view through his binoculars like open mouths containing the squat cigars of the U-boats.

He would have to get closer, changing the angle at which he could see them. Numbers alone interested him, designations in white on the conning-towers. The wind howled at him, making him lean into it to preserve his balance, but he felt gratitude towards it now that he was moving along the breakwater towards the guard-post, a grey concrete blockhouse astride the wall where it met the shoreline. Here it scanned the harbour wall and controlled traffic into the pens. If he were spotted—

Slowly, the angle of perception changed until the conning-towers of the two closest submarines began to betray tall white numbers. He could not make them out. The blockhouse was less than a hundred yards away, and he felt naked and exposed, and almost at the mercy of the storm. A gull screamed near his head, then was flung away by the wind, and he shuddered. He had to look as if he was heading for the blockhouse, in case they spotted him, and yet he had to incriminatingly use the glasses. He hunched a shoulder to the shore, raised the glasses, and looked. He could see the white stick of the figure 1, nothing more. The blockhouse was sixty yards ahead of him, and unless they were all blind or dead in there he must be spotted at any moment. He moved on slowly, hunched and leaning against the wind, glasses clenched against his chest in one frozen hand. The figure 1 was accompanied by the half-crescent that might have been the figure 0. His heart jumped almost painfully. A little closer, just a little — if it was a nought, then there had to be a 1 in front as well as behind.

He could see the numbers on the boats in Guernsey. He did not need to match them. QIC knew that U-99 to U-108 were all large boats like the two of the series he had seen. Any one in the series would be the proof he needed.

Forty yards — come on, come on, they must have seen me. He could not make out the numerals without the aid of the glasses, not through the murk of sleet and wind. Was it a nought, a zero — just 0?

Come on, come on—

He could see 01, he could see the two distinct numerals, 0 and 1. U-101. One of the series of boats that had been used for minesweeping duties in the St George's Channel. He was oblivious to his surroundings for a moment, enjoying a sense of triumph which was rare and selfish and self-congratulatory. They knew, they knew—

At the same instant that he recognized the numerals, he also sensed the deserted nature of the pens. No noise above the wind, no flare of acetylene, no hammer of riveting, no sign of any human being near the seaward ends of the two pens he could see most clearly. Waiting. The U-boats were waiting—

He caught the flash of welding from a distance along the pens. But here, with these nearest two, then others, there was nothing.

He felt newly chilled by the wind against his side.

'You there!' the voice called. Put up your hands! Come here!' The German spoke reasonable French. McBride, as he raised his hands, letting the glasses dangle from their strap against his chest, guessed he might have come from Alsace. 'Who are you?' There were two of them, each armed with a machine-pistol, coming towards him from the blockhouse.

* * *

'Charles, is indifference to human life a form of madness?' March was seated in his office, and the slim buff folder with the single stencilled word Emerald lay before him on the desk. He had been reading the typed sheets — one copy only — and now he sat back, rubbed his eyes with strain or disbelief, and asked his question of Walsingham, who let no answering emotion appear on his face; a face that was wan, chalky with sleeplessness, dark stains beneath the eyes that met March's gaze levelly.

'This is simply a projection, Admiral.' All his anger, even his premonition of guilt, was squeezed into the excessive formality of his reply. He had known how it would be, had understood in advance as he worked on the draft of Emerald through the night and morning, that it would brand him. He would be regarded in the Admiralty corridors as a strange and dangerous species, a disease-carrier. The images whereby he presented himself to himself were melodramatic, but he did not consider them overstated or false. He could already see the glazed, suspicious look in March's eyes.

'Naturally. You couldn't murder this many people without the permission of your seniors, could you, Charles?' The irony sat like an undigested meal on both of them. March wanted to disregard what he had read, even make light of it, thereby restoring a former impression of Walsingham. But this — what was he to make of it? Overwork, black humour, plain lunacy?

'Sir, you've assumed that I'm somehow working towards that final outcome — I'm not. What I have projected is a possible sequence of events which would produce a desirable result at a great cost. I understand the morality of it, Admiral, but I also understand the possible necessity—' He stopped himself, drawing tight the strings on the bag of his temper. Coolness was his only ally, and would be in the days ahead. There was a long way to go.

'Are you suggesting this, or not?' His hand brushed fiercely towards the open file as if it was infested with cobwebs.

'I'm suggesting that it might become our only feasible alternative, Admiral. If it achieves that status, then that is the operational plan we would, or might, follow.'

'My God, you know who's on board the cruiser, don't you?'

'I do.'

'We'd divert it, of course.'

'Not yet.'

'Of course not yet.'

'We must consider the effect on the Germans, though — surely?'

The dialogue snapped between them now, electrical sparks. Both men were tense, stiff in their chairs. Walsingham found himself defending the appalling logical outcome of Emerald even though he felt a profound loathing for it, and sensed he had begun a process in himself the end of which he could not envisage. What might he begin now to consider as no more than a necessity of war? Emerald was an idea that had been waiting for someone to think it. Why had it lodged in his mind?

'Of your plan?'

'Yes — my plan.' The reluctance was simply the slightest hesitation. 'It would be a significant, perhaps crucial, propaganda victory.'

'Or it might, even if it remained secret, have a profound effect on German military morale?' Walsingham nodded. 'And— the convoy to have been sunk by U-boats in the North Channel?' Again, Walsingham nodded. March seemed to wish to reiterate his ideas aloud, as if to make them the objects of a cool, rational analysis, and he had no objection to not voicing them himself. 'And if it came out, the Americans would never enter the war, might even sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler. We'd be finished.'

'Its secrecy would have to be maintained,' Walsingham commented. 'But we might only stop this invasion by