Emerald Decision

'It's no good—' Gilliatt whispered.

'Don't be stupid.' McBride took Maureen's hand, and squeezed it. 'Come on.'

He began running for the trees, and Gilliatt, the MP40 cold and lumpy and uncomforting in his hand, followed them after a moment's hesitation. A cow lumbered into his path, and he ducked alongside it. The animal was disturbed rather than terrified, and was moving aimlessly wherever clear ground presented itself. While it moved towards the trees, Gilliatt moved with it, watching McBride and Maureen and waiting for them to be challenged.

'Halt!' The word was English, almost unaccented. 'Who are you?' The cow tried to shake Gilliatt's arm from its flank, its stubby horns waving just in front of his face. McBride and Maureen were just in front of two soldiers, both of whom were unencumbered and whose guns were level on the man and woman.

'I could ask you the same thing!' McBride bellowed in an outrageous brogue, putting his arm around his wife. 'This is my farm — what are you doing dropping out of the sky on my dairy herd?' Gilliatt wanted to laugh in admiration of the bluff — which he knew would not work. The cow, startled by the voices, swerved away from the trees, exposing Gilliatt.

'Down!' he yelled, waited for the second which stretched out into danger-induced images of flame and bullets emerging from the two German machine-pistols — he could almost see the bullets in slow-motion, feel his leaden limbs transfixed — then McBride had dragged Maureen below chest-level and he sprayed the two Germans with the MP40 on automatic. They were flicked aside, leaving a gap of ground and the trees where the one dead parachutist hung like an admonition. He ran to McBride even as he heard shouted orders less than fifty yards away for men to spread out, get down, locate the source of the firing—

Panic was on their side now, driving them forward while it dislocated German thinking. Ambush? The Irish army? He hardly paused to haul Maureen to her feet, running on with her arm held in a tight grip into the cover of the trees.

'Where now?' he whispered, his head moving like a clockwork toy, swivelling for sight of danger. There was a crashing through the trees and bushes away to the right, but then a mottled, startled Friesian burst out near them like a pantomime cow, head up, legs comically uncertain. It crashed through bushes and down into a ditch on the other side. McBride pointed.

'Down there.'

'Where then?'

'Towards Liss Ard — a mile, no more. Get on with it!' McBride ushered Gilliatt on his way with the MP38 he had picked up from one of the two newly dead. A thin chattering forestalled the humorous remark that would have followed. Wood chips dusted down on them from the lowest branches. 'They know where we are — get on, Peter.'

Gilliatt pressed through the bushes, and dropped surprised into the deep ditch, rolling over but saving his ankles. Then he waited until Maureen dropped, catching her and holding her on balance. Then he helped her clamber out of the ditch on the other side. Across the fields from them the few lights of Liss Ard seemed to beckon at one moment, then float unsubstantial the next. There was more firing behind them, then the noises of McBride scrabbling to the lip of the ditch.

'I hope to God they've got something better to do than chase us!' he observed, coughing with effort, as they began running across the first field between them and the lights of the hamlet.

* * *

Drummond sat opposite the German officer who had come ashore from a small U-boat earlier in the evening, wishing that he would now go and consult with the company commanders who had dropped between Timoleague and Kilbrittain, one of the five designated drop-areas for the Fallschirmjaeger which he had originally selected months before.

Drummond had met Menschler, a staff officer for Sealowe and then for Smaragdenhakkette, on a number of previous occasions, in Berlin before the war and three times when he had visited the Irish Republic as an accredited embassy official. His real purpose had been to consult with Drummond on the proposed invasion beaches and the parachute landing areas for Emerald Necklace. But Drummond had never found himself warming to the stiff, chilly Prussian with the Iron Cross always wrapped in a handkerchief in his civilian pocket. Drummond was almost certain that it was the man he disliked; only occasionally would the sense of the man's German-ness remind him of the stark light that nationality played upon his own treachery.

Now, he wanted Menschler out of the way so that he could contact London.

Drummond felt himself diminished by his anxiety, by a pressing, enlarging sense of his duplicity. He was aware of it making the skin he was interested in saving crawl as Menschler, sitting opposite him in the study of the farmhouse, continued to discuss the movement of the airborne troops to the coast, and the possibility of counter- measures by the Irish government or Churchill. He knew now that he did not possess the commitment, that he did not wish to cast aside his mask, declare his hand. Drummond wanted to insure himself by warning the Admiralty of the landings. He assumed that the twenty-four hours before the seaborne landings was insufficient time for the British to mount any effective counter-attack — the Irish would not move, he was certain, as was the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin — but if he reported the parachute landings he would retain the appearance of still working for the Admiralty. Then, in the event of some disaster, he would be in the clear—

And he had a great desire to be in the clear. There was this growing sense of being alone, of being in personal danger, that could not be alleviated by news of the success of the parachute landings or the suggested might of the Wehrmacht, even the genius of the Fuhrer. McBride worked at the corner of his mind like an irritating mote. Him, or someone like him — one to one — was all that was needed, and he would be dead. The craven surrender to a sense of personal danger disappointed him, but he could not any longer ignore it.

'Very well, Drummond, now I will talk to the company commanders, then we will make our little tour, yes?' Menschler stood up with a nod, dismissive and superior, and went out of the room. Drummond, appalled at himself, strained to hear the closing of the door, even the footsteps across the yard to the barn where Menschler's staff had set up their HQ. Then, when only the wind's sound reached him from outside, he scurried to the kitchen and the cellar door, heading for the radio equipment by means of which he would warn the Admiralty of the reported landings of German parachutists in County Cork. A simple message that he was now certain would save his life.

* * *

Churchill paced the tiny, cigar-fouled office, the file labelled Emerald open on the desk between him and Walsingham, sitting silent and stiff on a hard upright chair. Even as he had sat there, Drummond's message from Kilbrittain had been conveyed to Churchill, interrupting their conversation. Churchill now seemed possessed of almost demonic energy, none of which he could satisfy or express or exude. It remained within him, galvanizing and bullying his frame like a seizure.

The dawn outside the one window combined with the overhead light to create starkness, even the sordid. A time for quarrels and for machinations.

Churchill picked up the telephone and in clipped, precise tones that still would not allow the captive energy to escape, ordered an emergency meeting of the Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff for nine that morning. When he put down the receiver again, he was staring at Walsingham with glowing eyes.

'So, it's begun, young man?' he said, hands on his wide hips, belly protruding from his unbuttoned waistcoat, hardly contained by the thin gold chain of his pocket watch. Then the big cigar was waving at him, pressed between two fat fingers. 'What d' you think the Irish PM will do about it?'

'I–I don't know, Prime Minister.'

'My bet is he'll do nothing, crafty as he is, and not without courage.' Churchill's eyes misted for a moment. 'Fait accompli, I think about covers it, don't you? Oh, they might join in if we did something—' He looked down at his desk. 'This scheme of yours. I think it's time to put the first stages of it into operation, don't you?'

Churchill picked up the telephone, and was connected almost at once with the First Sea Lord. He ordered the two minelayers to put to sea, and to relay the breached channel in the St George's Channel field. Then, he put down the telephone. Walsingham was breathless with the ease with which part of Emerald had become reality, and with the responsibility suddenly thrust upon him. Emerald was his scheme. It was now his Siamese twin, indivisible from him for the remainder of his life. He almost wanted to tear up