Emerald Decision

CHAPTER ONE A Visit to the Oberst

McBride had spoken to many former Wehrmacht officers, all of them reduced to scribbled private shorthand in his notebooks, or become disembodied voices on cassette tapes. Yet Menschler was different, if only in that he was more intensely reminiscent of a former self than the others. He was different, and not merely because he was blind; the lines of visible scar-tissue were like pointing accusations, perspective lines drawn to the dead eyes. Menschler was complete in another way, in the entirety with which he chose to inhabit the past, to walk corridors long disused — even the final corridors of the Führerbunker. His almost total recall promised well for McBride, chilling and fascinating him as they sat in the blind man's living-room in the wooden house on Norderney, in the East Frisians.

McBride was seated facing the window, perhaps two or three yards from the desk where Menschler sat, his back to the window and its square of grey sky and choppy sea nibbling at the stretch of beach below the house. The house had seemed an outpost as he had approached it on foot along the beach road. It was a summer house — Menschler lived there all year, and had done since the early 1950s, when his prison sentence was commuted by a West German court. It seemed to McBride that he had chosen this flat, windy splinter of the Bundesrepublik out of a total disapproval of post-war Germany. Hermitage, or place of exile.

The furniture in this main room was old, heavy, dark. Polished by his caresses rather than by creams or waxes. Even the way in which Menschler gripped the arms of his chair at that moment suggested both possession and defiance. And he had the trick of looking directly at his visitor's face as he listened or spoke, and not in a vague direction over one of McBride's shoulders. His blind eyes seemed disconcertingly aware in the room and its fading early evening light.

Smaragdenhalskette — Emerald Necklace — Smaragdenhalskette—

McBride's thoughts pushed impatiently, nudging him into speech. For the moment, he resisted the temptation to broach the real subject of his visit, while Menschler spoke of the last days, when his Germany had gone up in flames with two bodies in the grounds of the Reichschancellery. McBride wished, half-attentively, that he had obtained Menschler's first-hand impressions for his previous book.

"The Führer surrounded himself with SS trash in those last days—" They were speaking in German, a language in which the American, McBride, was fluent. The contempt, the hatred of the army's displacement by the SS was undimmed by the slow blind passage of forty years. "Even while their glorious leader, with his bowel trouble and his belief in sorcery, was doing away with himself like a rat taking poison—"

Four days before, in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, McBride had found the most tangible reference to Emerald Necklace, in a private letter written by Menschler to his cousin, a Junker Generalleutnant on the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht staff in Berlin, whose papers had been bequeathed to the Koblenz archives on his death in the early "60s. And unlike the memories of other men to whom he had spoken, or the official records, there had been no OKW censorship or editing. A private letter which referred to a top-secret army matter had survived intact, been waiting for him at the end of a long and fruitless search for a proposed operation that had never received the usual Fall — Case — designation used by OKW for France, Russia, Britain, Poland, Crete, Africa.

His book had begun as a sober treatise designed to enhance his academic status and reputation. The Politics of Invasion: the Führer and his Wehrmacht, 1939-42. Sober enough for any narrow-minded, conservative faculty board. McBride shrugged the image away. That was all before Gates of Hell, eighteen weeks on the New York Times list in hardcover, a million copies in print in softcover—

And he'd returned to his treatise, seeking to inject it with popular appeal, dynamism, something new. And Emerald Necklace, a name in a dusty Pentagon file of agents" reports from 1940, a name overheard or dimly remembered by a handful of Germans still living — and a reference in a letter dated October 1940 from Oberst Karl Menschler, a name he already knew dimly from his researches on Fall Gelb, the invasion of France, and from the planning group of Seelowe, Hitler's proposed and abandoned invasion of Britain.

McBride knew the war held few beneficial secrets to ambitious historians, especially one who had chosen the market-place to make his mark rather than the groves of academe that had seemed to slight and undervalue him for so long. All the bodies had been dug up. Babi Yar, the Cossacks handed over to Stalin's mercy, Katyn, the Final Solution, the atom bomb, had all received their popular historical exploitation. But — Emerald Necklace. If it was real, then it was new. No one had done it, no one even knew of it—

His hand had quivered, his breath seeming to be held throughout, as he read and re-read Menschler's letter to his cousin.

Now, Menschler seemed to subside like a kettle gone off the boil. He sat stiff-backed in the chair, staring at McBride's features as if he could read their expression, or as if demanding that he make some comment on what he had heard. McBride coughed, watched a seagull lifted then plucked from its course by the wind off the sea, and picked out the painted dark strip of the German mainland subsiding into shadow five miles away on the horizon.

"Herr Menschler, thank you. Perhaps I could take you — unless you're tired — back to France in 1940?" McBride wondered whether his voice betrayed his excitement, his anxiety. Menschler's face was partly in shadow, but he was certain that the head moved slightly, a small flinch at the tone or subject.

"Yes, Herr Professor?"

McBride paused on the edge of the moment. His journey in a rented blue Audi from Koblenz up the Rhine into flatter and flatter northern Germany the previous day had effectively depressed his tension and anticipation. The short ferry journey, leaving the Audi on the jetty at Norddeich, in the company of a few late holiday-makers from Hamburg and the Ruhr crossing to Norderney for an off-season, cheap-rate ten days, had increased his sense of possible foolishness, of chasing after a whim and looking very, very dumb. The flat, uninteresting Frisian island held no promise as the ferry neared the old village and its tiny jetty.

Yet Menschler was real, and alive, and he had written the letters in the Bundesarchiv. He could be a few minutes away from the new heart of his book, and its probable status as a best-seller — including the six-figure, maybe seven-figure softcover advance—

On the edge of the moment, he indulged the comforting, comfortable prognostications. Print-runs, contracts, sales figures. A new, unknown invasion— a rewriting of history? A strange, bubbling excitement in him was compounded by the clear memory of his telephone conversation with Menschler two days earlier; the Oberst had been frostily polite, but reluctant, as if for him, too, the proposed meeting was heavy with significance.

"You were on the support planning staff for Fall Gelb, and later for Seelowe?" Menschler nodded, but after a pause. Had the facts come back only slowly, or did he anticipate what might follow the slightest admission? "What happened, Herr Oberst, after Seelowe was postponed indefinitely on October 12th, 1940?"

"What do you mean, Herr Professor, what happened? We did not invade England, that is what happened."

"I mentioned a letter you had written — one of three or four — to your second cousin, Generalleutnant Alfred von Kass on—"

" The 23rd of October."

"Yes. Could I ask you about that?"

The silence seemed to continue for a long time, and the room's weight of furniture and memory pressed upon McBride with a tangible presence. He felt enclosed.

"Why? It was a private letter. Much better to ask concerning Fall Gelb, or Seelowe — I can give you many insights, my memory is excellent."

"Yes, Herr Menschler. I appreciate that. But I'm interested in Smaragdenhalskette, the Emerald Necklace you referred to in the letter. It wasn't a family heirloom."

Menschler's face remained unmoved at the remark.

"Perhaps not—"

"You said, and I quote—"

"I recollect exactly what I wrote." The voice placed McBride, made him a reporter, an amanuensis and nothing more. It canceled the inbred German esteem for his academic title. Now he was little more than a busybody from the gutter press.

"Why are you reluctant, sir? It's forty years ago."

"Reluctant?"

"There is something — but you won't talk about it." McBride suppressed a rising irritation sharp as bile.

"This is the first time you have come across this, this — halskette?" McBride was certain of a fervent hope in the question.

"No, sir, it is not. I have maybe another dozen references to it, always by the same name, verbal and written. In files in America, and here in Germany. Maybe in England, too, though I haven't checked it out. But at second, third, fourth hand, I admit. You were there—"

Menschler shifted in his chair. A parody of relaxation, yet McBride sensed the German had removed himself further from his guest, and from emotions that guest might initially have aroused. A thin cut of a smile on his face, giving the accusing lines of scar-tissue a more recent vivacity on his white face.

"Ah, I am to be impressed by such notoriety as you imply in your tone, mm?" The thin smile broke the planes of his face again. "You suggest that I — tell all? — to you, you will create your sensationalizing book around it and make, no doubt, a great deal of money. Who will play my part in the film, Herr Professor McBride?" The blind man had perceived the ego lurking behind the mask of the bland, sober historian. Probably knew of Gates of Hell.

"I am pursuing only the truth, Herr Menschler." It sounded palpably untrue, impossible, pompous. McBride wanted to laugh at himself, but Menschler did it for him, a sharp, barking sound, something long unused.

"And the truth will make you rich, mm? I believe there is a vogue for such books at the moment. My daughters tell me so. They are very often surprised to discover that my tales to their children are not merely an old man's dreams. They are products of the Socialist wirtschaftwunder, of course. Who was Adolf Hitler? And so on." Menschler waved his arms, dismissing his descendants perhaps for generations to come, but not forever. McBride felt it was unfair for an ex-Nazi to be so perceptive about his world. Especially unfair in a man blinded by a shell fragment in the Chancellery grounds and who had exiled himself- probably on his state pension — from the post-war Germany.

"And they show such films, such programmes — !" Menschler continued, his face entirely perspective lines towards the blind eyes. He was deeply angry. The hands polished the wooden arms of his chair in deep, massaging movements. "The filthy lies — these new Germans accept them, spit on the past as if it had nothing to do with them—"

McBride was appalled. He was losing Menschler.

"Very well, Herr Oberst. You wrote from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, from France, and from Belgium to Alfred von Kass during the second half of 1940. What were you doing in the support planning staff after the postponement of Seelowe? McBride leaned forward in his chair towards the blind man, urging him to answer, wishing for a loose senility of tongue or an avarice that might take a fee as a bribe.

"I was acting the part — rather well — of a German staff officer, Meinherr. That is what I was doing." McBride was incensed by the lordliness of the response, angry that the man was determined to retain secrets to which McBride felt he had some admissible rights of acquisition.

"What was Emerald Necklace?" he almost shouted. "Was it Fall Smaragdenhalskette?" He felt hot and angry and blocked in that cold room. The man would see nothing, give nothing away—

Menschler was smiling with superiority.

"It was — nothing at all. As you admit, there are no records, Herr Professor, and no one will tell you. In fact, you will never prove that the halskette ever came out of the jeweller's window."

"Why in God's name won't you talk about it?"

"Why — why? Is there a right that you have to know?" Menschler seemed to know that McBride had risen from his chair, and had adjusted his head so that the blind pale eyes still looked into McBride's face.

"Tell me, damn you, tell me!"

"No. I choose to remain in the conspiracy of silence. My motives are not important, and they would not be understood by someone as — crass as you. One of my daughters tried to ask me questions about your book, Gates of Hell." Menschler held up his hands, and closed them into claws. "I tore the book to pieces, Herr McBride. You have dirty hands, and you will never touch the necklace with them. I choose not to tell you — and there is nothing you can do about that!"

The Rt Hon. David Guthrie, MP, HM Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, had flown by helicopter from Stormont Castle to Aldergrove airport, then on an RAF flight to Northolt, and been driven into London by a Ministry driver. Now, in the office of Davidge the Home Secretary, preparing for an urgent meeting with the Prime Minister, Guthrie still looked at his ease, and to Davidge, as if he were appearing on television. Moving with the grace of an athlete or an actor, using his profile, marking off the room like his territory as he moved about it ot stood looking out over St James's Park in the autumnal mist that had persisted all morning. Though Davidge knew that the territory he really wished to appropriate was the office where they would lunch with the Premier.

The press considered almost everything Guthrie did and said as a piece of canvassing for some future election, some anticipated occupation of 10 Downing Street — but the press was usually kind, and more than normally impressed by his term of office at Stormont, and the progress that had been made towards some kind of stability in Ulster. Davidge, as he watched the man he could not be like and could not, therefore, like or admire, sensed the electricity running between the reports on his desk and the man at the window.

The Provisional IRA had detonated one hundred pounds of explosive at Aldershot, and a lot of soldiers and their families were dead and injured. And a second bomb had been defused at Catterick. In the wake of bombs in Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Southampton. A summer of mainland bombing had badly frightened people. Had threatened the Anglo-Irish Agreement almost as seriously as did the new government in Dublin. Yet Guthrie appeared at ease.

For Davidge, to whom the same school, the identical university and a parallel political career had not given the same ease before the cameras or the same overriding self-assuredness, Guthrie was habitually an irritant. He was still the man's fag, after all the years that had passed.

"What is the PM's feeling?" Guthrie asked finally, a look of frank distaste souring his features. As if he had spotted a weakness within himself which the words embodied.

"Distress — I think one may use the word unreservedly."

Guthrie turned to face Davidge as he sat at his desk.

"Two bombs in Dublin, another in Waterford," he snapped, as if he were the intended victim. "Fires all over Belfast and Derry. Those bastards are worried, Davidge — really worried!"

"But will they succeed, Guthrie — that is what you will be asked this afternoon — can they succeed?"

"In persuading the Dublin government to withdraw from the Anglo-Irish Agreement, you mean?"

"What else? That, I take it, is the object?"

"I should presume so." Guthrie rubbed his chin, and stared across the low mist shrouding the park. It looked cold out there; figures moved through the mist as little more than dancing spots tiredness might have brought to his eyes. He'd seen the growing apprehension on the faces of his PPS, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Even the GOC's staff were apprehensive, and felt unfairly restrained in a low-profile response which Guthrie hoped might keep the Dublin government as signatories to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Hadn't that been the real object of the summer's bombing campaign on the mainland? And of Provisional Sinn Fein's hysterical propaganda war? The election in July had changed the Dublin government. Fianna Fail might be persuaded, if sufficient pressure could be applied, to renege on the Agreement and adopt its traditional cry for a united Ireland. Stop all cross-border co-operation on security, stop working for a political solution. Then the cycle of violence would begin once more in even greater earnest.

He could stop it — could still prevent it. If the meetings to which he had invited the Irish Prime Minister took place, and were successful, they could reaffirm the accord between London and Dublin. If, if, if…

Clearing his throat softly, Guthrie announced: "The Unionists — of most shades — have agreed to hold back. They're not prepared to be seen to be giving way, but their opposition has dwindled. They haven't been able to destroy the Agreement, and they know it…" More urgently, as if he sensed he had failed to convince even himself, he continued: "If I can persuade Dublin to honour the Agreement…" He turned to the Home Secretary, one hand before him in an upturned fist. "We can still do it, Roger — we can hold the middle ground. That's why the Proves are lashing out now, why this is their last, desperate effort. If Dublin stays with us now, with a Fianna Fail government, then they're in trouble. All the men of violence are in trouble." He moved closer to Davidge, his eyes clear, gleaming. More softly, but still with urgency, he said: "You have to begin making arrests, Roger. We have to have these bombers — now. To maintain our credibility. Ever since Brighton almost succeeded, we've been waiting for another campaign. I may not be able to convince Dublin that the Agreement's worth tuppence if we can't locate a bombing team in our own back yard!" Once more, his hand closed into a fist. "They're blowing the cement out of the brickwork, Roger. It mustn't happen — not now!"

It was raining, and there was a wind sweeping across Guernsey which spattered the hard drops against one side of his face. The left side, which was now almost dead to any feeling, ached with awakened blood vessels whenever he rubbed it. Minor discomfort. He was far more concerned with the duration of the shower. It was already after dark, and after curfew.

Yet there was the same elation, familiar rather than self-betraying. They had told him, years ago when Drummond had first recruited him, that a lot of the work was sheer and unadulterated boredom. A pain in the backside, one senior instructor had drawled, dismissing espionage much as he might have done other people's boils. Michael McBride — currently Lt Commander McBride, RN — had wondered at the virginal excitements of training, at the persistence of such feelings during early operations immediately prior to the war, and then grown accustomed and accepting. Apparently — he smiled even now as he formed the thought — he was made to be an agent. He had found his metier, his vocation.

He stopped, pumping his hands against his arms, flapping himself warm. He took out the pencil torch, flicked on the thin beam for a second, and nodded. He was half a mile outside St Peter Port, on the main road from St Sampson and the cove north of Clos-du-Valle where the submarine had landed him. The S-class submarine could not navigate between Herm and Guernsey in safety — could have brought him no further south and nearer St Peter Port. He was making reasonable time, but he was impatient to arrive in St Peter Port, as a lover would be for a rendezvous.

He could not be certain of the currency of his forged papers, which were designed to get him down to the main harbour itself — certainly through and past the patrols in the town. He had been ordered to go nowhere near any of the contacts among the occupied islanders — Admiralty Operational Intelligence Centre had made that the strictest parameter of his job. He was not to be known to be on Guernsey. Even at the risk of the papers he carried being days, even hours, out of date.

He crossed the coast road, looked down over Belle Greve Bay briefly, taking in the new ugly groynes, the barbed wire rolls along the strip of deserted beach, the tilted signposts, the empty beach huts falling into disrepair almost in a single glance. He'd been to Guernsey before on minor jobs — nothing like this one, from the tight-lipped briefing and the solemn faces that made him want to smile — but this landscape of fear and occupation was deja vu simply because it was a scenery natural to him and his unusual occupation. Curtains blacked out the windows and lights of the newish retirement bungalows that straggled out along Les Banques from the old town in an effort to ribbon-develop St Peter Port and St Sampson. Some of them were empty, and some — he moved back across the road as he let in the thought — were used to billet Wehrmacht officers of the forces of occupation. And he must get on — it was strictly a one-night-stand, my darling. He began moving more quickly along the road. It was coming on to rain harder, and he ceased to worry now he was engaged in 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. Internal explosion? Torpedo? Mine? Depth charge?

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 — on Guernsey? These were submarine pens, but not like La Rochelle, Brest and St Nazaire and the rest of the Normandy and Brittany pens — no concrete, no massive servicing back-up, no — permanence — ? It had taken the Germans no more than a couple of days to throw up the corrugated sheds — which could only be for concealment, then.

These boats were either 'milchcow" refuelling subs, or they were long-trip, ocean-going boats, designed to bite the jugular where it was exposed, far out in the Atlantic — not around the North Channel where the convoys turned for the Mersey and the Clyde. Why here? For God's sake, he told himself sternly, as if lecturing the general staff of the Kriegsmarine, it's like keeping old silver in a pillow-case under the bed. He smiled, shifted to test the weariness of his arms, then continued his surveillance. His hands were beginning to go dead.

The damaged submarine in front of him carried no deck-gun. He could not see a single torpedo-trolley, not even the necessary hoists to lower the torpedoes on board. They were going out unarmed? His arms weakened with the shock, he felt as if struck. The mysteriousness of what he had found assailed him like a punch that simply went on happening, almost for a minute. He could find no answer, and his ignorance was like an impotence. What else, what else? he prompted himself. Concentrate.

At the stern of the submarine — and the one beyond it — he saw the strange, out-of-place pillars, curved and jointed like insect mandibles. The men working at the bow of the undamaged boat were erecting stanchions, and he assumed that the missing bow-section of the other sub had borne a similar, inexplicable mounting.

There was nothing else, nothing he could take in as clearly as before. Fact had been deadened by speculation. He was wasting his time now, it might come back later, just as if he had caught it on film, when he was debriefed. Once the resolve had gone, it was hard to hang on for sufficient time to take in the scene once more, repressing the selectivity of speculation. He wondered whether he could haul himself up with the frozen hands and aching arms.

One thing more — his angle of vision had precluded sight of them before, but now they moved nearer the stern of the damaged sub, as if to inspect the mountings. Two senior officers — one wearing a Wehrmacht greatcoat, the other in naval uniform. His weariness, the aching muscles in his arms, seemed to go away to a great distance. He was a spectator of some adult drama he could not comprehend. There was a familiarity, a common cause between the two senior officers, so unlike the Intelligence proclamations of intense and unceasing rivalry between the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine; all the way up to the General Staff and the Führer. What in hell were they doing?

Their conversation went on for minutes, then the two men shook hands, there was much self-congratulation, and, as they walked out of his view, he groaned with the return of awareness to his arms and shoulders. He didn't think he could pull himself back up—

The voice from below him settled the matter. "You — drop to the ground, at once!" McBride did not look down, nor did he pretend not to understand German.

Thomas Sean McBride parked the mud-stained Audi in the hotel car park, collected his room key and mail from the stiffly-polite clerk, whose words he brushed off as if they came between him and the indulgence of his weary disappointment, then took the lift to his third-floor room with its view across the Moselstrasse to the river and the suburb of Lutzel on the opposite bank.

When he had closed the door behind him, draped his raincoat over a chair, and slipped off his shoes, he poured whisky from an almost empty bottle into a toothmug, and stood at the window looking across the darkening river, occasionally shifting his half-seeing gaze to his right, where the Deutsches Eck promontory marked the confluence of the Moselle and the Rhine. His eyes were gritty with a bad night's sleep in the gasthaus in Norden, after the evening ferry journey back from the island, and aching from the whole day's driving back to Koblenz. His mind creaked through the grooves of disappointment and frustrated rage the blind Menschler's words had worn.

A barge passed slowly across his vision towards the confluence of the rivers, from his vantage hardly seeming to move. It possessed an apt, facile symbolism. A woman collected washing at its stern — that didn't fit the symbolism, and he smiled, sipped again at the whisky, almost shrugged off his mood. The first street lamps were coming on along the Moselstrasse, and the brake lights of the cars sprang out as red globes as the cars pulled up at traffic signals. Behind him in the unlit room his scattered — now useless, fatuous — papers, which he had enjoined the maid not to dust or tidy, and the leaning heaps of reference books subsided into gloom. Even so, his mind could not ignore them; an inward eye focused on them more clearly than his retinae registered the passage of the barge.

He had had it in the palm of his hand—

He'd blown it, crapped out on a blind man. The Woodstein of World War Two had gone down without throwing a punch!

He knew he was easing himself into a better mood — the bitterness was gone from the self-mockery, which might have been an effect of the whisky. Still, a blind man! His innate self-confidence, the blooming ego under the sun of his best-selling status, his greater potential, combined to prevent him from long periods of self-condemnation, self-awareness. He no longer had anything to fear from the less-clever men who eased past him into the grandly titled chairs of study or into the plush administrative grades. Menschler, therefore, was not an interview board of one, turning him down; without enemies, real or presumed, McBride was unable to categorize Menschler with them, and thereby retain an anger towards him. He was the dead, keeping the grave's secrets.

There'd be others—

He turned away from the window, put down his glass on the writing-table, ignored the open notebooks, the last pages of his trace of Menschler through army pension records and the telephone exchange, and fanned out instead the letters he had collected from the desk.

His eye was caught by the smallest notebook, but only momentarily, in which on three neat pages he had summarized his knowledge of Emerald Necklace. Little more than the faintest trace of an old perfume. He picked up the bulkiest letter, feeling through the envelope another, enclosed letter.

Gaps in Wehrmacht records, in the Führer Directives, in the papers of the General Staff. And a tight-lipped silence—

He shrugged off a returning investigative mood, and ripped open the outer envelope, from his university and presumably forwarding the other letter. He was seized — perhaps in compensation for disappointment — with a childish mood, with the eagerness of discovery of a child from a home where mail seldom came.

Excitement became self-mockery until he had carried the letter to the window. An air mail letter. And he recognized the handwriting? Yes, strong, small, neat. Gilliatt's hand. Peter Gilliatt, who had helped his mother out of Ireland in "41, and got her to America, had written to her in New Jersey, but whose mail had lost the cold trail after his mother had moved them west, to Oregon. Gilliatt must be an old man by now—

McBride savoured not opening the letter, the little childish excitement warm as the drink in his stomach. An old, familiar world was coming back with that handwriting, the red-blue edging of the envelope. The handwriting retained the secret of Gillian's age. He'd found out that McBride was in Portland, and written to the faculty — McBride nodded in self-compliment. Gates of Hell — Gilliatt had read it. Had he written about that? After all, his mother had been dead for nearly four years, and he'd never even met Gilliatt—

He'd entertained the fantasy, when the letters used to come to Jersey and his mother never seemed to tire of talking about Gilliatt, that the Englishman was his real father, despite the disparity of name. At first, the fantasy possessed romance — until his accidental consultation of a dictionary for the meaning of the word bastard in a book he was reading under the bedclothes with a torch. Then the fantasy had become shameful and secret, and he'd gone back to believing in the fact of Michael McBride, dead and buried in Ireland.

A long preamble, compliments on Gates of Hell, references to Michael, an invitation to visit him — and, certain as signposts, the change of tone. The hushed, secretive tone, and the sudden temptation to look over his shoulder communicated to the reader. The wrist adopting a nervous twitch as if to turn the letter's contents away from eyes that might be watching behind the double-glazing.

It was as bald and provoking as the trailer to a mystery film. McBride was amused, intrigued and disturbed in a complex moment of emotion. Instinctively, as soon as he had read the signature he moved away from the window and laid the letter carefully on the writing-table. Gilliatt had deliberately constructed his story with a novelist's sense of having to grab his reader. Half a dozen mysteries were hinted at, and strangers moved at the edges of the page, concealed in shadow. McBride felt himself enmeshed, as it was intended he should be.

The room darkened as he revolved the last paragraphs in his mind, and sipped the last of the drink. When the telephone rang, it startled him out of his reverie, but with the shock of cold water, or a threat. He shrugged, smiling away the insidious effect of the letter.

"McBride."

The voice was distant, official, clipped.

"Herr Professor Thomas McBride?"

"Yes, who is that?"

"The Embassy of the Deutsches Democratisches Republik." McBride felt an irrational chill, an aftermath of his day-dreaming, then recollected his hoped-for outcome of the call. Yet now he was impatient not to go to East Berlin, just as over the past weeks he had pestered the DDR authorities for a 'scholar's visa" for the chance to inspect archives on the other side of the Wall. He tried to shake off Gilliatt's unspecified claims on his time.

"Yes?"

"Your permission to visit Berlin to consult certain historical records has been granted, Herr Professor." A pause into which McBride should have dropped his gratitude like a silver collection.

"Thank you, but I'm afraid I'm very busy right now—"

"Herr Professor, the visa and the other papers are valid only for a few days. Besides, the importance of the papers you wish to see—"

"Yes, I see—"

"You wish to refuse this excellent, unique opportunity, Herr McBride?" There was academic demotion in the mode of address. "Herr Professor Goessler of the University, our leading expert on these documents returned to the Democratisches Republik by our Soviet friends — and one of our leading authorities on the Fascist period—" A slight pause, as if the sentence had escaped him in its own complexity, then: "He has agreed to place himself at your disposal—" It was not an inducement; rather, quiet outrage.

"I see—" Gilliatt's letter was indecipherable on the table in the darkness of the room. Smaragdenhakkette. Who could tell?

Why in hell should Menschler get the last laugh? It was as if the writing on the pages of the letter were in secret ink, and the warmth applied to its revelation had now gone, and the symbols were disappearing once more. He shrugged.

"Sure — and thanks. Thanks. I'll drive up to Bonn tomorrow and collect the papers."

"Good. But that is not necessary — they have been put in the post to you today. You may book a flight for tomorrow afternoon. Good hunting, Herr Professor."

The official broke the connection. McBride was left with the return of an older and more powerful scent than the fate of a father he had never known. He did not for one moment consider why the East German embassy should be concerned with his unimportant documents at eight in the evening.

CHAPTER TWO Arrivals

Don't freeze, don't freeze—

Awareness running through his body, concentrating for split-seconds in the soles of his feet, his hands, the centre of his back where the rifle or machine-pistol would be aimed, the back of his head. The moment of silence after the soldier had given his order, and McBride listened for the first step back, the adjustment the German would make to let him drop at a safe distance. No scuffle of boots—

Drop!

His hands seemed to come unstuck from the icy guttering very, very slowly, and his body drop through the air much too unaffected by gravity — he was floating, it wouldn't work — and his body could see the gun, the white upturned face backing away — then his boots hit the soldier a glancing blow, his fall was broken, he struck the concrete heavily, winded, rolled over, tried to get up and knew he was moving as awkwardly as if his legs were under water, then saw the German down on one knee, trying even more slowly to bring the machine-pistol to bear. He'd been caught by McBride's lack of delay, but he was recovering. McBride's arm and shoulder hurt from impact with the ground as he thrust up into a crouch, and hurled himself against the German, felt the rough serge of the field-grey against his cheek, the cold metal of collar-tabs, the edge of the helmet against his head — heaved rather than cannoned against the soldier, knocking him backwards. He heard the explosion of breath, the sharp clatter of the machine-pistol, as he rolled over the German, raised his upper torso and looked down into the young, scared face, its mouth opening much too slowly to yell. McBride pulled at the helmet strap, and jerked the head back. The mouth contorted, remained silent except for a gurgle, then McBride struck the German with his fist, below the ear. The head lolled when he let it free.

Immediately, he climbed to his feet, aware of the shadows alongside the shed, sensing the rain-blown night, aware of the silence beyond the muffled noises from inside. Then he dragged the unconscious — possibly dead — soldier up against the corrugated wall and left him, moving away immediately towards the pier-end of the shed. When he reached it, he paused. There was another hour and a half before the shifts changed, and he could not wait. The German would be unaccounted for within five minutes.

He was surprised at the manner in which his mind sought the amusing, the unexpected, solution, even as he looked at his watch and some more urgent part of the organism collected swiftly the few sensory impressions along the pier. A radio, muffled hammering, the spit of welding equipment, the patter of the sleet against the wall of the shed. He turned round with deliberate calm, and walked back to the unconscious German.

He bent over him. There was breathing, tired and quiet. He lifted the head like an easily bruised fruit, and removed the helmet. Then he tugged the German out of his greatcoat, the back of which was sodden, and removed his boots. He removed his own donkey-jacket and boots, became in seconds a German soldier. He buttoned the greatcoat right to the throat, picked up the machine-pistol, and returned to the pier. He paused only for a moment, as if patting mental pockets for required and necessary equipment, then began walking with a tired, bored shuffle towards the warehouse and the barrier.

And with each step the nerves increased, as he knew they would however much he attempted to disguise them in confidence, in indifference. He was aware of his heart-rate increasing, of his body-temperature rising; employed deep-breathing to calm himself, gripped more tightly the stubby barrel of the machine-pistol.

He was past the warehouse, and the barrier at the end of the pier was the only thing in his vision, when someone spoke in German, and he knew the voice was addressing him. The man he appeared to be. But he caught the note of uncertainty, too, just as clearly as he heard the footsteps coming from the side of the warehouse, closing on him.

"Friedrich, where the devil have you been? Friedrich—?"

The puzzled tone hung on the air like frost. McBride was a hundred yards or so from the barrier, and a man he could not turn to see was coming from behind him. Each footstep separated in time, almost to the rhythm of the dance-music he could hear from a radio. He half-turned, and slipped, sliding onto his back, his greatcoat billowing like a skirt. The soldier behind him burst into laughter.

"Friedrich, you're pissed, you bastard! Where is it, where's the drink, you selfish little—?"

McBride rolled onto his side, propped on one elbow, the machine-pistol pointing up into the German's face.

"If I kill you, I'll attract their attention, I know that. It just won't do you much good, old friend," he observed in German. Drink, drink—

It was coming to him. The German's mouth kept slowly popping open and closed, then he began sucking his cheeks to wet his dry throat.

"What's your name?" Puzzlement almost approaching the catatonic. "Just tell me your name — it might save your life."

"Willi — Willi Frick."

"Well done, Willi." McBride stood up, leaned against the German with a smile, and pressed against the nerve below his ear, just behind the chinstrap. Willi slid against him, gently declining. McBride pulled the rum flask from his pocket, and spilled liquor into Willi's mouth, down his chin and onto his coat. He let Willi lean unconsciously against him as he checked his own papers again — Friedrich Bruckner, and his rank, unit and number.

"Come on, Willi, you're going on a charge, and me with you."

He slipped Willi's right arm round his neck, hefted him upright, his own arm round Willi's waist, and walked him towards the barrier, making an exaggeratedly slow approach in the shadow of the warehouse, stepping out into the light only at the last minute — but by that time a Kriegsmarine Leutnant was already calling him.

"Soldier, what the devil are you doing? You, there!"

McBride snapped to attention, and Willi began to slide to the ground — McBride grabbed him, straightened the body. Someone laughed behind the officer, who seemed suddenly to consider it all as simply another scheme to make him appear foolish. His face contracted as if he had sucked a lemon and he marched across to McBride, who tried to adopt peasant stupidity as his habitual expression.

"What's going on—" Nose wrinkling, suspicion gleaming in his eye. "This man's drunk!"

"Sir—"

"No excuses — breathe on me, you dummy!"

McBride exhaled. The Leutnant shook his head in obvious disappointment. The guards behind him had formed a knot of eager spectators — one or two of them trying to make McBride smile or laugh by mimed antics and expressions. They were fifteen yards away — too far to hear his replies, his claims to identity. He kept a rigid face as the officer continued.

"Where did you find him?"

"Heard someone singing behind one of the warehouses, sir!" he snapped out.

"Him?" The Leutnant was disgusted. McBride nodded. "And now he's passed out — you weren't going to report this, were you?" Again the gleam of realization and superior understanding. McBride looked guilty. "Trying to sneak him back to his billet, weren't you?" McBride swallowed, nodded. "What's your name?"

McBride barked out his assumed identity.

"Him?"

"Frick, sir."

The Leutnant made a note (with a gold-encased pencil) in a little notebook contained in what might have been a slim cigarette-case. He put them away with a quiet triumph.

"Both of you — report to me in the morning. Now, get that disgusting clown out of my sight!"

"Sir."

McBride grabbed Willi's body more securely, kept his head down as he half-pulled him past the barrier, to the raucous laughter — soon quietened by the Leutnant — of the rest of the guards. He could hear them discussing the likely charges with the Kriegsmarine officer as he moved beyond the cold splash of the light above the barrier and the guard-hut. He heaved and pulled at the unconsciously-resisting Willi, a chill bath of perspiration covering his body from the effort and the bluff. He couldn't control his body's relief, and it irritated him. Eventually, he was in the shadows of a seaman's church opposite the Albert Pier, and he thankfully dropped Willi into the shadows by the wrought-iron gate. He looked up. A chill, unwelcoming little church, the rain like a shiny skin on something gone cold. He shivered, and moved swiftly away, the machine-pistol over his shoulder, the sweat drying on his forehead at the line of the helmet and under his arms. He wasn't quite ready to smile. He hurried up the Quay to the North Esplanade, out of the centre of the town.

McBride wondered whether it was courtesy on the part of the attache who met him at Tegel or the habit of security, that the man acquired his papers and ushered him through Customs and passport control in the terminal building. McBride had flown in on a Trident to Tegel, West Berlin's principal airport. He wondered briefly why the Cultural Exchange Committee of the Democratic Republic had bothered to send an escort to the airport, and was more surprised at the deference with which he was treated, and the obvious and studied compliments on his book, Gates of Hell produced like mottoes from Christmas crackers by Herr Lobke. The young man seemed anxious to please, yet almost too aware to be the pleasant, rather naive, person he exuded in McBride's direction.

"Professor Dokter Goessler is, I know, very anxious to meet you, to offer his help — it is a remarkable compliment—" McBride almost sensed the unspoken addition of to someone like you, but opted to accept the enthusiasm, the desire to be merely helpful.

Outside the terminal building, a black Zil saloon drew alongside them almost in the instant that Lobke raised his arm. There was even a uniformed chauffeur — one or two arriving passengers glanced at the little tableau, then disregarded it as if dissatisfied with the size or make of the car. McBride slid across the bench seat at the back, and Lobke climbed in beside him. The chauffeur pulled the sun-visor down, and accelerated away from the terminal doors.

They picked up the autobahn heading south-east into the city through the suburb of Wedding. Lobke seemed impressed and distracted from him by the passage of the numerous Mercedes saloons, the Porsches and Datsun sports cars. McBride indulged the immediate excitement of tall buildings, the neon silent but endlessly boastful. The advertisement of the wirtschafiwunder, a slick, affluent stranger in a peasant economy. West Berlin, he sensed immediately, postured like a glamorous, bejewelled model against the temporary chic of a ghetto or a slum. The city shouted at him, demanded he accept its image as reality.

He had been to Berlin before, researching Gates of Hell, but then the city had evidenced to his tunnel-vision the remnants of its battering in 1945, its German-ness, its foundation of ash rather than its post-war substance. Now, he had no preconceptions — he was there to study documents, follow an old, cold trail, and the city leapt upon his senses.

There was a short delay at the checkpoint. The guards seemed uninterested, in the late afternoon sunshine, in McBride as an American, but they checked Lobke's papers thoroughly, even though he had obviously crossed from East to West earlier in the day. On the East German side, the barrier was up almost immediately, and there was a smart salute for the car from the guards. The grey breeze-blocking of the Wall was almost obscured from the consciousness by the ceremony, the swiftness, of their arrival in East Berlin. Except that the Wall was suddenly high enough to cast a long shadow, out of which only after a few seconds did the car emerge into the slanting sunshine again.

One of the Vopos on the checkpoint telephoned the arrival of McBride and Lobke less than a minute after their crossing.

McBride, ringing from Koblenz, had booked a room at the Hotel Spree, an ugly block of pale concrete on the Rathausstrasse near the river and the Marx-Engels Platz. The porter seemed entirely respectful, the desk staff willing and welcoming. The hotel foyer was modern — polished dark wood, greenery and thick carpet, a coffee-shop open-planned to one side. He could have been in any modern four-star hotel in the world.

Lobke left him in the foyer, shaking his hand with a formal warmth, and promising that Professor Doktor Goessler would be certain to contact him. Lobke watched him get into the lift behind the porter carrying his bag, waiting until the door sighed shut, then placed his ID on the desk in front of the clerk.

"Where's the secure phone?" he said. The clerk seemed unsurprised, nodding to a row of four plastic globes sprouting from the wall alongside the coffee-shop. "Second from the left," he said.

Lobke crossed the foyer, watched by a woman in a beige coat and boots who was sitting in the foyer in order to be noticed. Lobke thought he recognized her from the television news programmes. Lobke didn't like the Hotel Spree and its spurious Westernism. He disliked it because it was part of a facade — behind it the grimy dullness of the DDR waited to displace fantasy. To jump out and remind the dreamer that it was a joke, nothing more substantial. On the contrary, he liked West Berlin, liked any messenger-jobs to the Federal Republic, or the rest of Europe. The shiny toys were real there.

Meanwhile the stupid cow in her Italian boots and West German coat waited for her dreary friends from East German TV or the pretend-glossy magazines. He dialled headquarters. Asked for Goessler after identifying himself.

"Chief?"

"Rudi, how did it go?"

"He's booked in. Seems to be enjoying himself — I think he'll go all the way with you, Chief."

"Rudi, what TV stations are you watching these days?"

Lobke laughed. "Ours, naturally."

"OK — well done. I think I shall call Herr Professor McBride at once, and introduce myself."

"Goodbye, Professor—"

Lobke put down the telephone, winked coarsely at the woman in the beige coat who turned her head away immediately, and then he went out of the revolving doors into the evening sunshine, to walk along the Rathausstrasse to Marx-Engels and the Unter den Linden. He liked to look at the Brandenburger Tor with the low sun coming through its columns. It seemed to hold out a vague promise, made to him personally.

McBride unpacked methodically as soon as the porter left, with the tip in dollars that he was not, by law, allowed to receive at all. He always staked his claim to possession of any temporary home by spreading his things around — the toiletries on the bathroom shelf especially helped to establish his claim. While he was still putting socks and pants into a drawer, the telephone rang.

"McBride."

"Ah — a call from Professor Goessler of the University for you, Herr McBride."

"Put him through, please."

McBride straightened at the telephone, as if before a superior. The window of his room looked over the shop roofs on the Rathausstrasse, towards the cathedral. He was pleased it did not face in the opposite direction, where he would have seen, beyond St Hedwig's, the Wall.

"Professor McBride?" The voice of a jolly man— an image he would not have connected with an East German Marxist historian. He shook his head at his own misconceptions.

"Professor Goessler, good of you to call me, sir."

"The pleasure is mine. Please, you are comfortable at the Hotel Spree — it is suitable?"

"Sure, fine, Professor."

"Good, good — if you had given us time, I would have booked your room for you. However, you have not made a mistake with the Spree. Tell me, my friend, are we to get right down to business, as you would say?"

"I'm in your hands, Professor. I haven't changed my ideas since I wrote you—"

"And you expect to find what you are looking for here in Berlin, in our archives?"

"What do you think my chances are, Professor? You've been through all that stuff the Russians gave back in the "60s and "70s."

"My friend, I have only scratched the surface, I assure you!"

McBride felt a thin, needle-like sense of satisfaction that Goessler seemed ignorant — and a disappointment at the work in front of him. Needles in haystacks.

"I see — but you'll give me freedom of access?"

"Naturlich — oh, I'm sorry. No, but you speak German, of course. My friend, perhaps we can have dinner together this evening?"

McBride looked at his watch. Six, almost.

"Sure. Here any good, Professor?"

"A rather bland cuisine, but it will not hurt us. Yes — shall we say eight?"

"Sure. Ring my room when you arrive, Professor, and I'll meet you in the bar."

"Excellent. Goodbye."

McBride put down the telephone, and crossed thoughtfully to the window, recognizing the process of revising prejudices going on inside him. How could he complain at the treatment? He stared at the cathedral, blackening in the shadows and the low streaming sun.

He suddenly received a curious image of himself crawling over the face of that cathedral, checking each of the figures and gargoyles carved on it, looking for a piece of paper with its secret message stuffed up one stone nostril of one of the hundreds of stone saints and devils. He laughed. If Smaragdenhalskette had dropped a couple of its stones in East Berlin, then he would find them.

McBride hunched down between two rocks, jammed in as if afraid he might lose some precarious hold. The greatcoat — which he had wanted to abandon half a dozen times — now kept out the searching wind that moaned off the sea, moaned against the low cliffs of the cove. The tide had just turned, and the sea — because the wind was from the north and against the tide — was choppier than when he had rowed in. It would be harder for him to pick out the submarine when it surfaced bow-on to the cove. The deflated carlin float was hidden only yards from him.

He'd returned the way he had come, avoiding the guard-posts since, despite his uniform, he had no movement order or excused-duty chit. It had taken him almost three hours. He looked at his watch again, then took up the signal-lamp. If the submarine was out there, he wouldn't know it until it surfaced; He was early, and all he could do was to signal periodically and hope they were using the periscope.

He flashed the morse-signal, M, put down the lamp, and listened. He'd heard a couple of cars and a truck pass along the road above him, but nothing had stopped. Yet he knew that by now they must be searching for him — someone would have found either Willi or Friedrich or both of them long before, and they would have been able to describe him and what he'd been doing when Friedrich surprised him. And they'd want to finish him off, deducing that he'd be taken off by submarine before light. And from one of the narrow, sheltered coves at the northern tip of the island, near l" Ancresse Bay.

He listened. Impatient, he picked up the signal-lamp again, hesitated more out of pride than caution, then flashed his morse dash-dash identification out to sea. The rain had stopped, but the wind was colder now, angering the sea as if to provide another barrier to his escape. He hugged the lamp to his chest while despising its use as a comforter.

Then, almost involuntarily, he flashed out the ident once more, gripped by a panic he could not laugh at or depress. He put back his head, and breathed as deeply as he could, inhaling and exhaling regularly for a minute or more. When he looked at the choppy, threatening, empty sea again, he could hear the sound of engines; identified them almost at once, and waited until the German S-boat rounded the low headland, its searchlight sweeping the tossed surface of the water, then — more in hope than expectation — flickering and dancing along the cliff-face, off the huddled groups of rocks. The tide on which he had come in had removed all traces of his arrival.

The S-boat — he watched it in helpless fascination — moved inshore and he could just make out the toy-like figures in caps and duffel-coats behind the coaming, the sailors at the bow operating the searchlight, or waiting armed with rifles and machine-guns.

He thought he detected the sounds of vehicles from the cliff-top even as the searchlight bounced away above his head, but the noise of the S-boat's twin diesels boomed off the cliffs, magnified and drowning any other noise. He felt his body-temperature drop, the wet rocks press on him. Then the searchlight moved on, sweeping back out to sea. The S-boat moved away, and in less than another minute had rounded the opposite headland, and its engine-noise died away.

Then he heard the shouted orders from above him. He had heard a truck stopping. He fumbled with the signal-lamp, adding to its shielding with his cupped hand as he flashed his signal on and off, again and again. The S-boat would be back, or another might be following, and in minutes — when the troops sent to search the cove had descended the cliff-path — he would be unable to signal.

"Come on, come on — for Christ's sake, come on," he muttered over and over like an incantation, flashing the ident out to the rough, empty sea, listening to the banging of the truck's tailboard, the scuffling of boots and the clink of metal which some freak of the wind brought to him clearly. He might even hear them click on their torches. "Come on, come on, come on—"

McBride wondered whether the crepes suzette after the richly sauced venison was for his benefit, or whether Professor Goessler was indulging himself in the surroundings of the Hotel Spree's dining-room and its cuisine. McBride felt full, and impatient. Goessler — florid, large, beaming, grey hair swept back into wings at the peripheries of a bald pink dome, bulbous nose and full lips — was someone who spoke little while he ate, except for pleasantries concerning the meal. Who would settle the bill had not been decided, but McBride — with some quiet amusement — considered it was more likely to be American Express than the University Bursary.

When Goessler had finished his crepe, he sat back, dabbed his mouth with his napkin in a tidy little gesture that would have suited a smaller head and more delicate hand, and beamed once more on the American.

"Not for your goodwill, you understand," Goessler said with unexpected perception. "This is what they serve here every night, not just when Americans are resident."

McBride laughed, put down his fork. The crepes were beginning to pall on him, possessing a certain unmistakable Germanic heaviness, richness.

"Coffee?" Goessler nodded, and McBride summoned the waiter. "Schnapps?"

"Bring me an Asbach brandy," Goessler told the waiter without replying to McBride, as if he had been irritated. There was also a barely masked casualness of authority, as if it had been long-accustomed, about the way he addressed the waiter. "And you, my friend?"

"I'll pass — just coffee."

"Bring a pot, and leave it," Goessler instructed, and the waiter nodded. "Large cups," Goessler called after him. He beamed on McBride, as if reassuming a role. "Now, of course, you wish to talk. Go ahead."

Permission to speak? McBride was puzzled by Goessler, and resolved the German academic must be interested in his work. Perhaps too interested — then again Goessler, interrupting him as he was about to speak, said: "Do not worry, my friend, I am not concerned to steal your work—" Again the broad smile, and the mouth almost overfilled with dentures. "No, I can imagine what you must think of me. Softening you up, mm?" He indicated the plates before them, looked with passing regret at the remains of McBride's crepes. "No, I am at present at work on more dialectical material — the official history of the German Communist Party, from the beginnings. I don't think any work of yours is likely to throw up new material for me, eh?" He put back his head, laughed, then smoothed the wings of grey hair flat against his head. "No, no, not that I would not perhaps change places with you—" He leaned forward confidentially. "To be truthful, much of my research is extremely dull. I do not suppose yours is, mm? What is it — what invasion plans are you wishing to discover?"

"Illuminate, you mean? Each one of the Fallen, every invasion up to and including Barbarossa." McBride returned the unblinking stare, the slightly fixed smile. Then Goessler nodded, as if releasing him from an hypnotic control.

"Very well, but I warn you, the bones have been well-picked by the Soviet Historical Academy."

"But for their purposes, not mine."

"Ah, true — they weren't writing for the American mass-market." Goessler laughed disarmingly, and McBride felt it impossible to be nettled by the implied slight. "Anything in particular, my friend?"

McBride had weighed the moment in advance, while showering. He could get nowhere without Goessler — Goessler might know people, as well as documents. He had decided to tell him.

"A little-known invasion plan without a Fall designation — called Smaragdenhalskette? He turned the remark to a question on the last word. Goessler crinkled his shiny forehead, then shook his head. The grey wings of hair loosened their grip on the sides of his head. He brushed them back again.

"The name means nothing to me — but, we can put some of my postgraduate students to work with you, Professor, to save you time." He clapped his hands together, possibly at the arrival of the coffee and brandy. "Yes — we shall do that for you, certainly. Your own little research team — and we will see what turns up, mm?"

David Guthrie sat in one of the beige PVC chairs with a tubular steel frame common to many current affairs programmes. Opposite him sat a renownedly belligerent interviewer, a low glass table between them. Guthrie always insisted on this staged informality when he was interviewed on television, rather than become a talking head and trunk behind a desk. He was never pedagogic in his manner, eschewing all suggestion of lecturing or hectoring that a formal setting might convey.

Red light — a camera moving in on him, the interviewer aware of the director shouting in his earphone and the link-man's voice across the studio. Guthrie felt the slightest pluck of tension; adrenalin sidled through him. He smiled in the general direction of the interviewer, half-profile to the oncoming camera. Behind the cameras, beyond the meagre area of carpet, the bareness of the studio suddenly impressed itself upon him — he kept the smile, but deepened it as if prior to serious thought. His little circle of bright light, himself spotlit — and the rest of it nothing more than a facade.

"Secretary of State, we've heard on the news tonight of a further spate of fire-bombs in Belfast, of two bombs being defused in Birmingham, and an explosion in Glasgow. What do you say to those people who tonight are concerned for their safety?"

Guthrie did not clear his throat, but leaned slightly forward, talking to the interviewer but at points of emphasis turning to the camera.

"I wish there was better news — I can only tell you that the Government, in co-operation with the police, the Special Branch and the security forces in Ulster, is committed to hunting down and removing into custody the people guilty of these hideous crimes—" His eyes glittered, and the interviewer, who knew Guthrie as well as anyone in television, suffered the familiar moment of doubt as Guthrie seemed to shift into a higher gear of response, of emotion. He could not decide — ever — whether it was a political or a human response. "I saw the film of those people being carried out of the wreckage of that supermarket in Belfast — just as your viewers did. We want this business finished."

"But, Mr Guthrie, many people may well consider you to be one of those guilty men. Is it not your forthcoming meeting with the Irish Republic's Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues that has provoked this latest round of outrages?" The interviewer disturbed his papers, as if checking his own question.

"I would understand that, except that I'm sure that the people of this country — of the United Kingdom — understand by now that our attempt to preserve the Anglo-Irish Agreement is the only answer, immediately and in the longer term, to the bombings, the killings and the violence. It is not the cause—" He smiled at the camera soberly, with gravitas. "It is my belief, firmly held, that all the parties here, in Ulster, and in the Irish Republic, with the. sole exception of the IRA, really do want the Agreement to continue to be the basis of our approach to the problems of the Province. What we must not do is to lose resolution. We can win — we will win—"

"Mr Guthrie, you say that we can win. You hold out a degree of optimism. But is it not a fact that the Irish Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues are interested in ending the Anglo-Irish Agreement?"

Guthrie was silent for no more than a moment. He smiled gravely and shook his head almost delicately. "No," he said. "My meetings with him and his colleagues next week are occasions I approach with a deal of cautious optimism." He looked directly into the camera. "The Dublin government is not interested in chaos in Ulster. The Prime Minister of the Republic feels the grave responsibility of the hour as much as I do myself. I am firmly convinced that he will not be persuaded by acts of terrorism to withdraw his support for the Agreement. If the Provisional IRA believe that either government will compromise on its determination to defeat the men of violence, then I must tell them that they are wrong."

"What other subjects — apart from the maintenance of the Agreement — will be on your conference agenda, Minister?"

Guthrie smiled. Authority and confidence, he told himself. Would they come…? How many more bombs would it take to make Dublin give in— cancel Ulster's future…? He felt perspiration begin at his hairline. His smile did not waver. A close-run thing…

"I am not prepared to prejudice our meetings by announcing specific objectives. We will, I am certain, reaffirm our joint resolve to overcome violence. Next week will not be the end of an accord, but the beginning of a new understanding. A point from which we will go forward. The Provisional IRA are desperate. Why are they so afraid of my meeting with the Irish Prime Minister if he intends to renege on our Agreement—?"

"Just one moment, Minister—" The interviewer touched his earphone, listened, and his face became grave, pressing into its most belligerent lines. He nodded, then said bluntly: "We've just received news of an explosion in a restaurant off the Charing Cross Road— there may be as many as thirty dead and wounded."

Guthrie looked appalled, as if some direct and violent attack had been made upon him. The studio appeared no longer bare; more it was insulated, safe.

"We'll go to the newsroom for more details—" the interviewer added, almost unnecessarily. Guthrie appeared unable to speak.

Not one arrest — not a single arrest. People would be frightened, would contemplate drawing back. He knew he was poised upon a critical moment, yet he was unable to speak, to reassure, to offer solutions. His initiative, his career, lay with the bodies and the broken glass and the walls stained and scorched. The Proves had brought their war to him, and they could yet win. The red light winked off on his camera, and he rubbed his face as if trying to remould flesh grown suddenly loose, shapeless.

He had perhaps two minutes in which to get the carlin float down to the waves, inflate it, and begin rowing out to sea — to nothing and no rendezvous. The sub must have moved offshore, dived deeper, when they picked up the S-boat on asdic. Another truck moved along the cliff-top, stopped, and he could hear the soldiers being disgorged. What he had seen he was not to be allowed to report.

What had he seen, then?

Get on, get on — There was no time to debate the significance of the sheds and what they concealed. He was simply a camera, film waiting to be developed by an expert.

He could not hope to mingle with the searching patrols when they reached the beach, no chance that they would not find the deflated carlin float hidden in the rocks. Yet as soon as he moved, even on that dark beach, he would be spotted. Time was to be measured in strokes of a paddle, and the range of a German rifle.

He flicked the ident twice, then sent the emergency distress code. His head wavered between the cliff-top — crunch of boots on the loose gravel of the cliff-path — and the empty sea. Then he moved, crouching his way to the float, hoisted it on his shoulder, and began running, labouredly and reluctantly, down the beach towards the water. Even the wind resisted his efforts, it seemed, and his feet began to sink into the newly uncovered sand, slowing him. All the time, he listened behind him and looked ahead, waiting.

They must have seen him, must have—

He splashed through the shallows, flung down the float, knelt by it in the bubbling white foam, and released the stop on the compressed-air canister. The air roared, and the yellow float bucked out of his grip, writhing as it inflated automatically, growing like a nearing target.

Shouts"?

He looked out to sea — black shape against the darkest grey? No.

He experienced a moment of paralysis close to panic, until the first hopeful shots from the cliff-path could be heard above the noise of the waves and the wind, and he was startled into looking back. He could see torch-light wobbling and hurrying down the side of the cliff, see the headlights of the trucks as they backed and turned seaward to illuminate him. Torches flashed uselessly out to sea. He stumbled through the surf, cursing himself and tugging off the restraining, sodden German greatcoat. The wind cut through him as he let it go and clambered into the float which seemed to want to rush back towards the shore, then tumble away from him out into the cove. He unhooked the paddle, began pushing at the water, desperately overcoming the onrush of the water, waiting in a space full of shouting and gunfire, then feeling the retreating tide grip his float more severely, lifting him out to sea. He paddled furiously as soon as its grip lessened, fighting the next incoming wave — water splashed into his face, froze his hands almost at once, drenched his body through the three sweaters. He yelled, struck, yelled, struck — driving the bobbing, wild float into deeper water.

Bullets plucked at the water to left and right — one cried closer than the wind, and he instinctively ducked. Nothing, nothing out to sea. The signal-lamp had gone, with the greatcoat or with the water slopping in and out of the float. The wind palpably restrained him.

Radio — there must be a radio in one of the trucks in touch with the S-boat, to bring it back to pick him up.

He looked back, fleetingly, as if ducking from the blow of the next wave and the slosh of stinging, icy water the wind whipped off its crest — saw the figures on the shore-line, in the stance of riflemen.

It would take one bullet. He ducked into his next stroke, renewing the frenzy of his activity, his vision confined to the bottom of the float, which was gradually filling, and to the next wave. Hearing above the wind the buzz of bullets, the shouted orders now far behind him, but with no sense of the futility of his escape—

He looked up.

Black shape, bow-on. A submarine surfacing, blowing its tanks, the conning-tower running with water, decks awash — perhaps five hundred yards from him. Increased firing, but he was suddenly invulnerable. He struck madly with the flat paddle, heaving the float through the waves, his arms and shoulders protesting and his hands dead and fixed vice-like by the cold to the paddle.

He was up to his waist in water suddenly, having heard nothing of the bullet's passage through the float, with no sense of impact or deflation. But the carlin float ducked almost shamefully beneath the next big wave, and the paddle remained too deep in the water to make its next stroke. He unclenched his hands, and was at once at the mercy of the waves, flung under then up as he struggled, then under again. The sweaters and his stolen jackboots seemed impossibly heavy — he struggled out of the boots, swallowing water, coughing, let the boots drop away through the water, tried to pull off one of the sweaters, but could not tread water to do so.

He looked ahead — the submarine was still five hundred yards away, but he could see the dinghy they'd launched, and began to swim very slowly, furiously, towards it.

He was in the water for a long time, aware of the recurring drag of the tide taking him out, but seeming always weaker than the water that heaved over his head with each incoming wave. He drove forward with heavy arms, legs kicking feebly, the weight of his clothes increasing; deadweight. He was not certain, but there seemed to be short black intervals between successive strokes, between the times he lifted his head to try to spot the dinghy — a view through a lens-shutter, alternating, the black moments elongating, swallowing reason—

They dragged him in, unceremoniously, head-first so that his face was plunged into the slopping water in the bottom of the dinghy. Two men in oilskins immediately began to pull back towards the submarine, and a third pulled him into a sitting position. He was grinned at in the darkness.

"All right, sir?"

He nodded, retched but brought none of the swallowed water up, then nodded again with more affirmation.

"That S-boat—" he began hoarsely.

"Skipper's watching out for it, sir, don't worry."

And McBride simply nodded, and retreated a little into his sense of relief until the dinghy banged against the hull of the submarine, and hands took hold of its ropes, and the Petty Officer in the dinghy handled him like a child being lifted up to see some passing sight above a crowd of heads. Other men in oilskins — the smell of them was omnipresent — assisted him along the swaying, unsteady, awash after-deck towards the conning-tower.

"Ditch that dinghy! Our friend's back," he heard from close to him. Two young faces under caps, one of which nodded to him, and round the headland he had a momentary glimpse of the reappearance of the S-boat, searchlight trained ahead of the craft to pick them up.

"Shake it up down there!" someone barked. McBride was bundled down the conning-tower ladder, stumbling and weak. "Clear the bridge!" he heard the same voice call above him. Seaboots thumped over his head, and then his rescuers dropped one by one into the confined space. He was aware of faces watching him intently, then the captain closed the hatch, and dropped at his side. The klaxon sounded. "Dive, dive, dive!"

After someone had thrown a blanket over his shoulders, no one took any more notice of him. His rescuers disappeared, and each man but himself seemed to have a task that precluded all other activity or sensation.

"HE at Green Nine-Oh, increasing, sir," the asdic operator called.

"Starboard 30, steer Three-Two-Oh — full ahead together."

"Three-Two-Oh, full ahead together, sir," the coxswain answered. Then there was a sudden strained silence, punctuated only by the pinging of the asdic as the S-boat closed on their position. McBride was suddenly entirely apart from the men in the control room — the cause of their danger. McBride glanced from face to face — the captain alert beside him near the periscope column, the first officer at the diving panel, the two men at the hydroplane controls, and the coxswain at the wheel.

McBride heard the throb of the S-boat's screws, beating on the thin hull of the submarine like someone forcing entry. Eyes sought the hull above them, and the silence intensified as the screws faded.

"HE fading, sir, and now bearing Green One-One-Oh."

Something scraped on the hull, as if sliding past it.

"Christ—" someone breathed.

"Not yet, I hope," the captain murmured. "Hold tight, Commander," he added, as if aware of McBride for the first time. McBride clutched himself to the periscope housing, feeling slightly ridiculous, very weak, and dizzy with tension. He was shivering with cold. Then the muffled explosion beneath them and behind, the lurch through the length of the submarine, the flicker-douse-flicker back of the lights, water running from a slight leak, and the sense of people picking themselves out of a ruin and shaking themselves like wet hounds. Everyone grinning as the second depth-charge roared like a breath some distance away.

"Take her down, number one — to the bottom."

The first officer looked away from the diving panel. "It's risky, sir."

The young-faced Lt Commander replied: "We'll sit this one out. Jerry will be buzzing around up there like a blue-arsed fly. He's only got small depth-charges, but even they could make a hole in our nice submarine—" He grinned. "If we sit still, he'll get cheesed off."

"Sir."

McBride felt the submarine settle gently on the bottom a moment later. A slight list to port. Silence. The pinging from the asdic seemed a long way away. The water had dribbled almost to a stop from the strain-leak.

"Silent routine."

The captain looked into McBride's face, as if assessing some prize he had won. When he nodded, McBride felt he had passed some test successfully. And was able to smile.

"Thanks."

"Your pal's in my cabin, wants to talk to you — if you're ready. Better change first, mm?"

McBride nodded. The asdic increased its tempo once more, but McBride felt calmed by the confidence, the almost alien superiority these submariners exuded like a gas. He was out, and on his way home.

The next brace of depth-charges shook the submarine, and the lights merely flickered. Someone cheered quietly.

"Silly cunt—"

"Bloody awful shot."

He followed the Lt Commander out of the control room.

"Why won't you tell me now, Goessler? Why do I have to play this elaborate bloody game which amuses you so much?" Goessler's companion was young, dark and broad-faced. The expression of the face was angry, creased into lines such as a bad-tempered child might display when denied some treat. It was a face that could have been pleasant, open, vivid with pleasure. But perhaps something of its secret life had grown on it like a patina, rusting the intensity of its emotions, restricting its expressiveness. Moynihan, sitting in Klaus Goessler's office in HVA HQ in East Berlin — a grey Trade Ministry building on the

Wilhelm-Pieckstrasse — was being made to feel younger than his twenty-eight years, and distinctly inferior in mind and position to the academic who was Deputy Director of the East German Intelligence Service's Western Europe Section.

The Operations Commandant for the Belfast Battalion of the Provisional IRA writhed in silence under the unctuous yet steel voice of the balding German. Now, in answer to his blurted, sulky question, Goessler smoothed the wings of hair flat against his head, and smiled, leaning back in his leather chair. He looked over Moynihan's head at an oil painting of the pre-war Unter den Linden that hung on his office wall. Only after almost a half-minute did he speak.

"My dear Sean—" Moynihan's face winced at the pretended equality, its superiority sticking through like a broken bone. "I have explained to you. We must not be seen to be involved in this — the scandal must emerge naturally." His hands imitated a growth, an explosion, on the top of his desk. "Naturally, also, you have the impatience of all youth—" A slight shake of the head. "As impatient as Professor McBride in his more academic way. If I told you what, you would want to take the how into your own hands. Like a mad dog — which is what I sometimes think you are." A glint of contempt in Goessler's eyes. "You would go for the throat. You would lose, like a poor actor, your sense of timing completely."

"God, do you think you're running our show, or something, Goessler?" Moynihan was holding one hand with the other on his lap, afraid to make them into protesting fists. But he could not control his tongue. "You've got the bloody bomb we need, you bastard! Give us the bloody thing and we'll blow Guthrie and his fucking meetings sky-high!"

Goessler banged his hand flat on his desk, once. Leaned forward, and said, levelly, each word weighted: "That is exactly why you will not be told, but will do as you are told. You are bomb-happy — real or metaphorical. You could not be trusted to exploit the situation to its maximum advantage. Your strategy may not work. Indeed, it is the view of experts here that it will not. The mainland bombing campaign has not discredited Guthrie, nor his initiative to hold the Anglo-Irish Agreement together… no, don't make childish faces or spit on my carpet, Sean! It is true. Guthrie may well have persuaded Dublin to honour the Agreement, even to extend it. If that should happen, your organization would, slowly but certainly, bleed to death."

"Then give us the means of blowing Guthrie out of sight, damn you!" Moynihan's fist banged Goessler's desk. His frame twitched and stirred with frustrated, humiliated rage.

"Not yet. When the moment is right, and natural, you will have it. Not before. If Guthrie is discredited — utterly — in the particular way we intend, then Dublin will certainly withdraw from all cooperation with London. There might be no new agreement between them for five, perhaps as many as ten years. America will be outraged—"

"Then, damn you, tell me what it is!"

Goessler shook his head. He brushed smooth the wings of grey hair, his features amusedly superior. A slim, clever mind was reflected in his bright gaze.

"The British have managed to install an extradition treaty with the Americans — block off your funds from there. That has dried up other sources of revenue. All of that will alter when Guthrie is discredited."

"Time's running short—"

"Which is why you are here simply to see McBride. When he goes to England, you will go with him. When he finally reaches Ireland — as we intend he shall — you will continue to watch him. When the moment is right, you shall have him. He will provide you with your grand explosion, and without help from you. Just let him do so. In a couple of days, at most, he will find what he needs here and be on his way. A man has written to him from England — we will point him in that direction."

"It's all too bloody coincidental!"

"No it is not!" Goessler saw Moynihan blench. "Just wait.

It will work. And when it does, you will have enough time to make certain that this time you win your armed struggle." There was a mocking light in Goessler's eyes, and the gleam of assessment. When he seemed satisfied, he added: "Very well, Sean — you may go."

CHAPTER THREE Unpolished Gems

The light on the breakwater, the South Ship Channel, the bulk of Portland Castle were ahead as the submarine altered course, the lights of Fortuneswell flickering before people remembered the black-out; dusk advancing over the island. McBride saw it from the conning-tower of the submarine, standing alongside the young Lt Commander, dressed in a borrowed duffel-coat. Overhead, the two Hurricanes who had provided escort droned away towards Weymouth, mission accomplished. The destroyer which had rendezvoused with the submarine at dawn when it began its ten-knot surface-run across the Channel, was a slim, knife-like shape behind them, having preceded the submarine with an asdic sweep until they were only a couple of miles from Portland. McBride felt drained, and reluctant, even though the view of Portland harbour was familiar, even comforting. He had felt little of the tension, the strain, of finally slipping away from Guernsey underwater, or of the silent routine, the submarine resting on the bottom outside the cove during the remainder of the night. His tension had been of a different kind, leaning forward like a sick man, whispering out his initial debriefing report that had occupied most of the night — coming out of what seemed like a light, self-induced trance at the distant occasional concussions of depth-charges. As soon as he had settled in the captain's cramped, neat cabin, the curtain drawn between it and the companion-way, he had begun to respond to the quiet, teasing, unceasing questions of the lieutenant RNVR — commissioned at the outbreak of hostilities from civilian intelligence — which had seemed to fall on his awareness like a constant, defeating drip of water. The lieutenant was little more than an amanuensis, taking a shorthand account of everything McBride had done, seen, thought during the hours he had been on Guernsey before he could forget, or ignore, or arrange the material according to his own speculations. The professional agent had made no comment, offered no speculation. The submarine had surfaced, after coming to periscope depth, and given the captain the relief of a choppy, empty sea, and then begun its run of sixty-odd miles for Portland.

The submarine docked alongside the fat bulk of a depot ship, suddenly cramped and made insignificant. McBride, looking down at the jetty from the conning-tower, could see the two figures waiting for him. Then the lieutenant joined him next to the submarine's captain. McBride shook hands with the captain.

"Thanks."

"Almost a pleasure." The submariner tossed his head towards the jetty. "Have fun."

"Are you ready, Commander?" the professional asked, not so much in impatience as with due attention to time and required expertise. McBride nodded, rubbed his face as if massaging it, and took off the duffel-coat. "I'll go down and check the arrangements." The lieutenant climbed over the side and down the ladder.

"I'm glad to say not all RNVR chaps are like him," the young Lt Commander observed after the head had disappeared. "Cold fish, I should think?"

"Professional," McBride observed.

"And you're an amateur?"

"Sure I am," McBride replied in the broadest brogue he could summon. "Thanks again."

He climbed lightly over the side of the conning-tower, and down the ladder. He jumped the narrow space of oily water onto the jetty. One of his reception party, almost to his surprise, was a Wren — his driver, he presumed. He grinned at her, but she ignored him. The Commander, RN, of NOIC staff, Portland, seemed to expect him to salute, then appeared to lump him with the lieutenant as a professional agent to whom naval discipline was an unreality.

"Shall we go?" he asked.

"Where's Walsingham?" McBride asked, suddenly not wishing to clamber into a car and sit out some unlit night drive along the south coast.

The commander seemed to sense his reluctance at once, and said with a smirk: "You haven't anything against women drivers, have you, McBride?"

McBride felt suddenly irritated, unreasonably so. He supposed it to be the aftershock of his escape, or simply his weariness.

"Where the hell is Walsingham? I want this debriefing over so I can sleep!"

"Walsingham's at the Otterbourne house — you're being taken there."

McBride raised his hands, as if to wring them in protest and frustration, then he seemed to subside, grinned tiredly, and merely said, "Very well, your honours, let's get on with it, shall we?"

The noises of the submarine releasing its crew behind them seemed safe and familiar to McBride as they walked to the Austin at the end of the jetty. A jeep was parked behind it, with an MP sergeant leaning on it, and a driver and two more MPs inside. Armed escort. After Guernsey, it all seemed piffling and unnecessary to McBride.

"The prisoner leaps to loose his chains—" he sang softly. The Wren, standing next to him, looked up into his face and smiled.

They left the commander standing watching their departure, McBride and the lieutenant in the back seat of the Austin, the jeep ahead of them, and turned out past the depot and along the short stretch of Chesil Beach to Ferry Bridge and the outskirts of Weymouth. The intelligence officer seemed disinclined to converse, as if his task were accomplished. McBride surrendered to the expertise of the driver as she tailed the jeep. He tried to sleep, dozing off occasionally, waking often and catching the moonlight glinting like steel on Weymouth Bay, the trees along the A352 like sentries, the snail-like progress through blacked-out Poole and Bournemouth, the darkness-moonlight alternations of the New Forest, the stop-start and sense of a bigger, more frightened town as they passed through Southampton.

And came awake at the burning, the smell of it in the car and the light playing disturbingly on his closed eyelids. There had been another raid on the port. The Wren had to thread her way behind the jeep through undamaged side-streets to the north of the city centre, which seemed a chain of fires linked by darkness. There were fires, too, down in the dock area. McBride, half awake, saw them from a seaward vantage, Southampton Water reflecting the glare down as far as Hamble and beyond.

The car jolted over fire-hoses, paused at hastily erected barriers — McBride saw in the light of a fire begun by a stray bomb a bath hanging crazily out of the torn side of a house — and moved slowly on until they turned onto the main Winchester road. As if he had felt obliged to witness the damage to Southampton, he now slid down in the seat again, and began to let the thoughts of his village, Leap, and the cottage and his wife, Maureen, repossess his dreaming. There had been something stinging and salutary about Southampton, diminishing his own previous night on the run in Guernsey. It was no great matter beside the dead and burned in the seaport behind them. Reflected firelight still shimmered just above his head on the roof-lining.

Whenever he finished a job, there was time for the slowness of Ireland, for the cottage, for his wife and the gleam of moonlight on the ceiling of their bedroom and the frame of the brass bedstead; and the water jug which was frozen over on winter mornings. He settled to the work of memory, hardly noticing as they turned off the A33 just south of Otterbourne, entered lodge-gates, and passed down a drive lined with oaks, finally drawing up before a small eighteenth-century country house which seemed to disdain the modern encroachment of a guard-hut on its gravel drive.

The Wren parked the car, and McBride was shaken awake by his companion. He groaned, stretching and feeling stiffer than he had done between the coal-bunkers or the rocks. Maureen slipped away from him, smiling, and he felt intense irritation with his companion. He climbed out of the car, nodded to the occupants of the jeep who were already at ease and smoking, then saw Walsingham on the steps of the house, waiting for him.

He consciously prodded himself forward, wanting nothing more than to return to sleep.

Lieutenant Peter Gilliatt, RNVR first officer of HMS Bisley, hefted his grey hold-all down from the carriage and over his shoulder. He had got as far as Cardiff, and the variety show at the New Theatre and then a pub called The Moulder's Arms where some of the female customers had inspired anxiety rather than desire — before the local police had caught up with him. He had put aside the thin, warm Welsh bitter almost gratefully, surprised more that the PC had found him than by the order to return immediately to Milford Haven and his ship.

But it had been relatively easy for the police, he had decided during the slow, late-night train journey through south and south-west Wales into empty, unbombed Pembrokeshire. He always went as far as Cardiff on his forty-eights, preferring it to Swansea, he always went to a show or the flicks, and he always got half-tight in one of half a dozen pubs at the back of Queen Street. One day he would change his routine, and they wouldn't find him.

Some of his crew had been on the train, all noisy and most of them angry; reluctant to believe that he was as ignorant as they as to the reason behind the summons back to the minesweeping flotilla. Gilliatt, amusedly considering that an officer's pleasures were less vivid than those of his men, had no great sense of being cheated out of leave, and therefore no great expectation of dire necessity attached to their sailing orders. The Jerries had probably sewn a new net of mines in the Bristol Channel or outside Swansea harbour either by minelayer or aircraft — nothing more or less than routine.

Milford Haven station was in complete darkness, and Gilliatt let his crew members roll and grouch ahead of him down the wet platform, curse their mislaid tickets and their officers, then go out into the light, soaking rain to find their way down to the docks. The ticket collector saluted as he took Gilliatt's ticket, and Gilliatt touched his cap. The Moulder's Arms and the other back-street pubs in Cardiff were no great loss. He liked being at sea — which was why he had resigned from the navy in "37, fed up with Naval Intelligence and a desk-bound life. And why he'd re-enlisted, in the RNVR, as soon as Hitler invaded Poland. He'd been quite well aware that there would be a war in Europe when he resigned, and he'd known he'd be trapped in Intelligence unless he temporarily broke his career ties with the Royal Navy.

He carried with him the constant satisfaction of having outwitted the Admiralty. Their Lordships had decided, it seemed, that his university background and his facility in French and German shaped him for only one role in the navy — in Intelligence. With the first hints of the reorganization of Admiralty Intelligence to prepare for another war, Gilliatt had gone to work for a small boat-builder in Appkdore until September 1939.

He was a happy man as he passed through the dusty-smelling booking hall of the station, his shoes clicking on the wooden floor, and out into the soft Pembrokeshire rain, insinuating and persistent. Pulling up his collar, he set off in the wake of Campbell, Howard and the others he had recognized. As he walked down the hill from the station, past the NOIC HQ and the Lord Nelson pub, he could see, through the rain, the harbour and bay laid out before him, across to the mouth of Angle Bay. Escort ships ready to fuss over their charges, and another convoy building up. Cardiff — and the less immediate past — faded behind him; he was a shallower, more contented man.

A D-class cruiser emerged from the wet, murky curtain of rain, a light high up on her superstructure the only spot of colour in the greyness. From the vantage point of one of the three British merchant ships, there was something piled and slabbed and sinister about the cruiser's bulk; and something worn, and tired — an air of making do, of potential defeat. The greeting in the signal-lamp's message was hollow, almost threatening. The American cruiser had already vanished back into the rainy mist, heading for the neutrality of Roosevelt's America.

They were fifty miles east of St John's, Newfoundland, sailing from Halifax, with two thousand miles of the North Atlantic between them and the Clyde or the Mersey. On leave in New York, before they sailed, the strangeness of a country not at war had seemed welcome, shallow, and even something to be despised. Women well-dressed, arms full of packages from early Christmas shopping at Macy's; taxis to be had by raising an arm; Manhattan garish and alive with light when darkness fell; the skies quiet. Now, as the British cruiser — their sole escort — emerged from behind the weather, heaving with the effort, it seemed, it brought with it the smell of war, of Europe.

The cruiser signalled each of the three twenty-thousand-ton merchant ships in turn. There would be complete radio silence except in the utmost emergency. All communication was to be by means of signal-lamp, as it had been with the American cruiser.

America was now impossibly distant, infinitely desirable, and incapable of being disdainfully looked down upon, veteran upon rookie. Between them and their destination, as they zig-zagged their way across the Atlantic, were the U-boats. Their imagined presence was more potent than the grey, unsubstantial bulk of the cruiser.

The cargo — grain, machine-parts, aircraft spares — was no longer important, nothing more than a futile gesture of help by the Americans, and a single drop in a bottomless bucket to the British. And the idea of it being a trial-run for new convoy tactics seemed now only the unenviable prerogative of the guinea-pig. Some of them knew the figures for shipping losses the previous month — 103 ships, 443,000 tons. Britain was, being starved to death. And that did not seem to matter so much now as the garish safe lights on Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the coffee-shops, bars, restaurants where they were a strange and welcome species.

McBride had agreed that Goessler should be paid the equivalent of five per cent of the advances and royalties of the book, when it was written — Swiss account, dollars or Swiss francs did not matter. McBride was gratified in discovering Goessler's motive for helpfulness, and accepted the demand without question. He was paying no one else, and the agreement was unwritten and conditional on the discovery of some striking and convincing new material.

It took the four students that Goessler had subverted temporarily from their postgraduate work two days to assemble a slim folder of evidence for the existence of Emerald Necklace. Goessler had only occasionally appeared in the room off the main university library that he had caused to be set aside for the work, like a nanny periodically checking upon her charges. He claimed — to McBride's anxious anticipation — to be tracking down some of the names that had been thrown up by the documentary material they unearthed. Five per cent had galvanized Goessler — he seemed slimmer, less jolly, sleeker of mind. McBride enjoyed the cupidity displayed by the East German Marxist academic. It made him feel more justified in despising those American professors guest-reviewing Gates of Hell as a bad, badly-written book.

McBride handled the collected documents with a reverent delicacy, and returned to them compulsively again and again — reading the German slowly, caressingly, and with a catch-breath anticipation that he might have misread, mistranslated, read into.

As the girl student, Marthe, brought his coffee in a lumpy brown earthenware mug, and he nodded his thanks, he was reading the movement orders of two infantry divisions, dated late in October 1940. The two divisions, XXXII and XLV, had not been stood down when Seelowe was canceled by the Führer — except very temporarily. A leave-pass record had survived with the movement order, and there had been little leave — unlike other divisions in France initially required for Seelowe — after the cancellation. A number of senior officers had been summoned to Berlin — regimental and abteilungen commanders — but for junior officers and other ranks only compassionate leave. After a very brief bivouac in the Cherbburg area they had been transferred to Brittany, to the Plabennec-St Renan area north of Brest. Here, they were to establish a temporary headquarters. The temporary nature of their headquarters was attested to by the surviving requisitions of building materials and billets.

In the same fortnight after the cancellation of Seelowe — Sea Lion — on October 12th, certain units of the XIV Panzer Division, the division's Panzergrenadier Brigade and the Panzeraufklarungsabteilung — the armoured reconnaissance unit — had also been moved from Holland to the Brest area of Brittany. Lastly, the recce company, the three parachute rifle regiments, and the engineer-signal units of a Fallschirmjaeger — Parachute — Division had been detached from their headquarters in Poland and been reassigned to guarding certain airfields in northern France on behalf of the Luftwaffe. Such a wasteful employment of highly-trained, elite troops that McBride had lumped it with the other evidence.

What he had gathered was sufficient proof that a small, highly mobile invasion force had been assembled in Brittany during late October, 1940. Smaragdenhalskette was a reality in terms of the deployment of units.

It remained without a target, an objective.

This was not something that disappointed McBride. Just as he accepted that what lay now under his hand had come spilling out of dusty files when required, so it would go on. He knew that somehow he was meant to find the documents relating to Emerald Necklace, and that it would all be in his book, and that the book would be a big one. One slight regret — he would have liked an eye-witness, or more than one.

He sipped at his coffee, the warm liquid spreading like the warmth of self-satisfaction in his stomach. Goessler, when he popped his head round the door of the room, found McBride still studying the documents as if they were already fine-print contracts, and sipping at his coffee.

"Herr Professor McBride—" Goessler seemed so much more bumbling at moments, yet so much sharper at others now that he was in on the money side, that McBride wondered what kind of mind kept slipping in and out of focus behind the rubicund, smiling face. "Working on the unit designations—" He sat down beside McBride, hand on the younger man's arm immediately in a conspiratorial gesture, voice lowered. For five per cent, Goessler was apparently only too willing to subordinate himself to McBride. McBride nodded, amused. "I have so far traced one man living in Berlin here who was with XLV Division in France during the — critical time."

"You're sure of this?" McBride smiled, saw a moment of calculation in Goessler's eyes, dismissed it, and added: "Can I meet him?"

"That is being arranged — by my secretary. Possibly this afternoon. The records are very sketchy. I think we are lucky to find this one man. There may be others, of course."

"If he knows enough, it may not matter—"

"Of course — your visa terminates tomorrow—"

"Shit, yes."

"You can rely on me to continue — our work, Thomas." Goessler smiled at the introduction of the Christian name. For him, it seemed to seal something.

"I'll get this stuff duplicated, Klaus." McBride indicated the documents with a wave of his hand. "Thank you."

Goessler bowed his head in a bird-like eating movement towards McBride.

"It is exciting — and it will be remunerative, Thomas. Much more interesting than the early years of the German Communist Party, I assure you."

Goessler's laughter — which caused the beavering team of students to look up in unfeigned surprise — seemed to bellow in the quiet of the Archives Department of the university library.

He was the janitor for A block of flats out on the Greifswalder Strasse, well into the north-east suburbs of East Berlin. A fifties built, unrelievedly grey area of workers" apartments in ugly, duplicated blocks. No trace of history prior to the war and the peace and the Communist Party of the DDR, as if the erasure of the past had been deliberate, final. He had been a Funkmeister — a Signals sergeant-major — with the Signals Abteilung of XLV Infantry Division, and his name was Richard Kohl and he was now an upstanding, clean-nosed member of the Communist Party — and undoubtedly an HVA "unofficial" set to monitor the behaviour, visitors and domestic life of the occupants of his block of flats — having been an eager member of the Nazi Party since 1936. He'd transferred from the Wehrmacht to the Waffen-SS in 1942, and ended up at Leningrad for his pains. A short prison sentence after he was caught on the outskirts of Berlin by the Red Army, a process of 'reeducation", and he was fit for service in the new DDR.

He was thin, in his early sixties, and with a padded, complacent mind. As he talked of 1940, however — undoubtedly remembering forward through the remainder of the war — a gritty quality of survival seemed to emanate from him and McBride could no longer simply despise him.

"Yes, we were transferred to the Brest area late in October — if you say the twenty-sixth, sir, I won't argue. Near Plabennec, sir, that's correct."

Goessler had insisted on accompanying McBride, but remained carefully silent during the interview. McBride and Kohl might have been alone in the simple, comfortable janitor's apartment. Kohl's wife had been sent shopping. Pictures of party leaders on the wall, a small TV set, patterned carpet which clashed with the flowered curtains, a solid, plain three-piece suite, a square-edged, dark dining-table, the flimsy chairs of which were covered with the material from the curtains. Flowered wallpaper. McBride allowed one part of his mind to indulge itself seeking an analogous room. He finally found it in British films of the 1940s — there was something old-fashioned about the room, as if the consumer-boom of the fifties and sixties simply hadn't happened. It hadn't here, he reminded himself.

"I remember those weeks — we were taking it turn and turn about in tents and billets, sir," he added, smiling with the recollection. Then he shook his head. "Officers had billets in the villages around — we had tents a lot of the time, or barns, or outhouses, sheds."

"Why were you there, Herr Kohl? Wasn't such temporary billeting strange for France at that time?"

"Yes, it was. But we were just told — special assignment. And that meant you didn't ask questions, just did it."

McBride restrained the temptation to glance in Goessler's direction. Kohl seemed unaware of the German academic in one corner, perched on a dining-room chair, occasionally making his own notes.

"What was that assignment — what did you do during those weeks?"

"Played around with radio-gear, ran signals exercises — as we always did."

"Nothing — special"?" McBride's disappointment- was evident.

"No, sir. More intensive practice, a whole new range of codes to learn — though we didn't use them in practice — but not much more than that."

"Your briefing — what was your briefing?"

"I — sir, I never had a briefing. I was in hospital, caught influenza sleeping in those tents. Hospital in Brest—"

"How long?"

"Late November — perhaps even early December when I rejoined my unit."

"And where was your unit then?"

"Stood down, sir. Rest and recuperation, regrouped around the Rennes area. Proper billets—"

McBride's face screwed up in frustrated disappointment.

Then he said very slowly: "And what happened while you were away?"

Kohl thought very carefully. "XLV Division never moved — no, they did, sir. One of my pals told me they'd all been shipped down to Brest, by lorry. Now, when was that?" He screwed up his thin face with the effort of recollection, rubbed his pale forehead beneath the thin grey hair, tapped his pursed lips, then said: "Sorry, sir — late in November, but I don't remember—"

"That's all right," McBride said hollowly. "Go on, what happened?"

"They waited in Brest for two days, then got shipped back to Plabennec, every man in the division."

"No rumours, nothing like that?"

"Everyone thought it was England, sir. Our new codes were in English, I remember."

"England, with two divisions and a Fallschirmjaeger Division's rifle regiments?" McBride laughed, concentrating his sudden absence of enthusiasm in the mocking sound." The Isle of Wight, maybe, Herr Kohl—"

"I remember, the Fallschirmjaeger left a couple of days before the Division was shipped to Brest. Just weren't there in the morning, so the lads said. Never saw them again — and there was a lot of aircraft activity that previous night, heading for England."

"They all disappeared?"

"Three rifle regiments, recce company, signals, the whole lot. There was even a Parachute Artillery Abteilung that came in at the beginning of November — with the ten-o-five recoilless guns — they'd gone as well."

"Where, Herr Kohl — flown out or transferred?" McBride leaned towards the former Funkmeister. Goessler coughed, making Kohl shift slightly in his chair, aware of his fellow German again. He shook his head.

"And, as far as you're concerned, these units of parachute troops vanished — in England?"

Kohl nodded. "Yes, sir. They couldn't be anywhere else — could they?"

McBride shook hands with Goessler once more, the German clasping both hands round McBride's hand, pumping vigorously as if to restore circulation.

"It is both more and less of a mystery, eh, Thomas?" he said, smiling like a cut melon. "Do not worry — I will continue the work here. You must now go to England in pursuit of our mysterious parachutists — anything I learn will be sent to you. That part of it will be simple."

McBride nodded.

"Klaus, thank you. I confess I was disappointed — but there was enough there to make me go on, track the whole story down. Maybe it's even better than before — the disappearing Fallschirmjaeger, uh? Everyone likes a mystery. Maybe the book will change its shape if I can get hold of more—" His lips compressed as he realized he was walking away from East Berlin, from papers he might not have seen, people he might have been able to interview. "If I apply for another visa, you can smooth it, mm?" Goessler nodded. "People is what we want, Klaus. Men who served in those units with Kohl — records of those night flights late in November—" The avenues of investigation bubbled out of him now, as Lobke from the Ministry opened the door of the Zil and made him aware, by looking at his watch, that his journey to Tegel could not be longer delayed. McBride nodded at Lobke. "OK, OK."

"Go along now, Thomas — and leave everything with me. You'll be hearing from me very soon, I am certain."

His hand was released and McBride climbed into the car. As it pulled away from in front of the Hotel Spree, McBride looked out of the rear window. Goessler was waving enthusiastically after the car.

The morning was crisp, cold, clear, a sky washed of imperfections except for the smudge on the southern horizon which was the effluent of Southampton's bombing. McBride nevertheless felt invigorated by the air, the frost crunching like powdered glass underfoot, the chill on his wan, tired face. He rubbed one hand through his hair, tousling it. Walsingham walked beside him, deep in contemplation of the debriefing, of the notes he had studied and the tape-recorded dialogue with the weary McBride.

McBride liked Walsingham, effectively his special operations controller for OIC for the past year. Walsingham was a few years younger, though his rank of Commander, RNVR, seemed to belie his age — his age belied the sudden rank, McBride corrected himself. He had been drafted into OIC by means of an RNVR(S) commission at the outbreak of war, by Rear Admiral Godfrey — Director of Naval Intelligence — himself, from his job in civilian intelligence. By general repute, Walsingham was brilliant, painstaking, thorough, imaginative — and ruthless. McBride liked him as much for the suggestion of that latter quality that always seemed close to his eyes and mouth as for his more acceptable qualities. He was what McBride could accept, and admire, in his operations controller. And Walsingham respected his qualities as a field-agent.

A rook called from a bare tree, hunched above its great lump of a nest. Both men looked up at the noise, smiled.

"Well, Charlie-boy? Have you learned what you wanted? You're being remarkably silent, even for you."

"And your sudden brogue isn't having the slightest effect on me, Michael lad," Walsingham observed, looking down at his shoes, rimed with the frost on the lawn in front of the house.

"Touché!" McBride stopped, facing Walsingham. "What's it about, Charlie? I'm not an idiot — even I could smell something big — what is it?"

Walsingham wandered a few steps away, then turned to face McBride. He was suddenly boyish rather than donnish as he rubbed at his fair hair, making it stand up away from his pale forehead.

"I wish I knew, Michael, I wish I knew."

"Listen, Charlie, it's a two-way process. You talk to me, now."

Walsingham, as if ignoring McBride's demand, walked away from him, seeming to study the bare trees, the last curled leaves on the lawn — scuffing some of them with his foot, a sharp, crackling sound. McBride was surprised not at his reluctance, which he considered only apparent, but by the intense mental agitation that Walsingham's young face clearly evidenced. Walsingham looked up.

"I discount, of course, your remarks concerning the camaraderie of the Kriegsmarine and the Wehrmacht — at least, I want to ignore it, perhaps simply because it's so tantalizing to speculate on it." He smiled, almost in a hurt, defensive way. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his brown jacket — Walsingham was rarely in uniform — as if to limit the dramatic emphasis he might bring to bear on his remarks. "Your drawing is quite inadequate, you know — your skill with the pencil, I mean—"

"Charlie, are you trying to tell me something?" McBride grinned. "Go for your gun, Kincaid," he observed. Both men stood, ten yards apart, hands in pockets.

"Don't joke." It was said with the affronted dignity of a lover.

"OK — talk me through it, then."

"I guessed the sheds concealed submarines, but I couldn't understand why they were so— so flimsy—" He surrendered to emphasis, waved his hand briefly at his side, replaced it in his pocket. He looked like a schoolboy trying to explain a breach of discipline. "And the submarines in there — Raeder and Donitz don't have that many submarines, so this use of Guernsey is quite out of character, and ties up a lot of boats — look, they must have been building these big U-boats at the expense of other vessels!" He looked up at McBride, as if for confirmation, and McBride realized for the first time that Walsingham was rehearsing an argument; or was repeating one that had already failed to convince other people.

"Go on, Charlie," he said.

"Let's cut over this way," Walsingham said quietly, pointing towards a grove of trees that ran down to the stream that crossed the estate around the house. McBride nodded, and they walked in silence until Walsingham pursued his argument, the cry of another rook seeming to galvanize him into speech.

"Those boats you say — you think they were ocean-going big boys, right?" McBride nodded. "But they might have been milchcows, right?" Again, McBride nodded. "And again, they could have been a new type — what do you think they were doing? Had been doing?"

McBride walked on in silence for a time, listening to his own footsteps and those of his companion.

"I don't know, Charlie, I really don't. Your eyes lit up when I described the stuff on them — you tell me."

"I'm going to have to talk to the Admiralty — to confirm my suspicions. They weren't loading, refuelling, anything like that?" McBride shook his head. They emerged from the trees, and the narrow stream was filmed with grey ice. It appeared remarkably forlorn, evocative. The grass along the bank was stiff, sharp-edged, with rime. Beyond the stream, the countryside to the edge of the estate — where it was bordered by a farm — was dulled, rendered vacant and inhospitable by the grey air, the trees fuzzed into rounded lumps of frosty branches. In the distance, cows picked their way, painfully slowly, across a white field.

"No, they were repairing the damaged sub — but I had the sense of mission over, rather than mission ahead." McBride stared into the distance, seeing the Friesians taking and losing shape against the background. "What had they been doing, Charlie?"

Walsingham looked at him, and seemed to judge that the moment was right.

"By the way, you're going back to Ireland via Milford Haven, with a minesweeping flotilla — it should be illuminating!" He chuckled. "Sorry — I want you to see for yourself, then tell me — via Drummond or the captain of the minesweeper, of course."

"Just tell me, simply — what are the Germans up to?"

"Drummond's crying out for your return, you know — there have been several reports of submarine activity, and of at least one agent landing west of Cork—"

"Charlie, don't be irritating—"

Walsingham flung his arms wide like a magician. He looked more like a schoolboy than ever.

"I think the Germans are going to invade the Republic of Ireland — and I think they're going to do it soon!"

Heathrow was conspicuously neat, and orderly, and cool. McBride had used the airport many times before, either travelling to England or in transit for Europe. The limited chaos that he always perceived by comparison with Kennedy or Dulles or Logan — those long cool corridors, the quiet, the whisper of luggage-conveyors and escalators — had disappeared; he had always regarded Heathrow as the triumph of desperation, perhaps the apogee of the British capacity to make do as a way of life. Yet now the busiest airport in the world was creeping about its business.

Because of the soldiers.

The terminal was full of them, armed, and the baggage search seemed endless, and his passport was checked with a thoroughness perhaps more appropriate to Dusseldorf — in fact, he realized as the passport controller, with a soldier standing armed and bored behind him, held his passport face-down beneath his desk, that the British had imported, and put to use, the German computerized passport system they used at Federal Republic airports.

It was almost an hour and a half after he disembarked from the Trident 3 that he emerged with his bags into the lounge of the terminal. He looked immediately for a telephone, found one near the bookstall, and dialled directory enquiries.

He was eager to work in London, go over all the wartime records he could lay hands on, and therefore he had decided to get Gilliatt out of the way quickly. Gilliatt and his own father seemed impossibly distant figures, unreal beside Kohl and Menschler and others that Goessler might unearth, given time. If he could arrange to see Gilliatt — hire a car and drive down and back in a day — listen to the old man, thank him and walk out of his life, so much to the good.

A soldier paused near him, looking with exaggerated suspicion at his bags. McBride smiled, edged them closer to him with his foot. The soldier — who appeared sixteen behind his straggly fair moustache, acne belying his manhood — nodded, and moved on, the 7.62 SLR over the crook of his arm looking modern and plastic and completely, unnervingly deadly. McBride watched him move on. The guns on the belts of German policemen had become familiar but this — because a rifle and carried by a soldier in an airport — disturbed him.

Gilliatt's number was supplied by the enquiries operator. McBride scribbled it on the back of the folded letter from which he had supplied the address — outside Sturminster Newton in Dorset. His Michelin map had indicated on the plane that he could drive there and back in a day.

He dialled.

Emerald Necklace, he thought, grinning helplessly as if he had been given an expensive, long-desired present. It was in his hand now, in his hand. The phone went on ringing for a long time, and then it was picked up.

"Yes?" A woman's voice, and he was instantly aware that the voice was weary of answering the telephone; someone expecting the same wrong-number call for the tenth time.

"Is that Sturminster Newton 8826- Peter Gilliatt's home?"

He'd had better transatlantic calls. A long pause, then: "It is."

"My name is McBride—"

"Michael McBride?" the woman asked. "No, I'm sorry — Thomas McBride, you're his son, aren't you?"

"Yes — to whom am I speaking?"

"Peter Gilliatt's daughter." "Hello — is your father available to talk to me?"

"I'm afraid he isn't—"

"I see. When will I be able—"

"You don't see at all, Mr McBride. My father is dead — he died last week of a heart attack."

CHAPTER FOUR Western Approaches

Gilliatt's cottage was on the northern outskirts of the village of Sturminster Newton, beside the road to Marnhull. It was white and pretty and very English to McBride's eyes as he approached it, checked its name against the sign on the three-barred gate, and crunched up the gravel drive. The last roses round the trellised porch to the door were puckered with a slight overnight frost, but more than that they carried an overtone of mockery to McBride. As if, in some medieval woodcut, a skull grinned out of the heart of each flower.

Thatch, leaded windows, brass door-knocker. McBride, as he shook off the ironies of the cottage's appearance, almost expected Mrs Miniver to appear in the doorway. Instead, Gilliatt's daughter was small and neat and dark, and her face was wan, strained, without make-up. She gestured him inside without a greeting, and he noticed the wedding-ring on her hand. She was aware of his glance, and rubbed one hand with the other.

"I'm staying here for the moment, though I don't like it — since the break-in. Through there, please—" Rugs covered the flagstones of the hall. He ducked under an exposed beam, and went into the lounge which overlooked the garden behind the cottage. Dark wood panels, bright prints on the old, substantial furniture, french windows out onto the terrace.

He said, shocked awake: "What break-in? When?"

He turned on her, even as she was gesturing him to sit down, and she flinched as if struck. She sat down, brushing her pleated skirt smooth, then plucking at the collar of her blouse. She was in her late thirties, McBride estimated, and normally a self-composed, assured woman. Worn down by grief? Or something else?

"It was last week — just after the funeral. I came down at the weekend to find his papers and stuff everywhere—" Her hand swept vaguely across her skirt, indicating the carpet. "It — seemed more terrible because he was dead, can you understand?" He nodded. "And so ridiculous here — my father had lived here for years, it couldn't be anyone from the district—" He wondered whether she was reassuring herself. "I've stayed here this week — my husband's coming from Bristol on Friday."

"You're frightened," he said bluntly. "Why?"

"I don't know—" She frowned, the broad clear forehead running into furrows, her small mouth pursing. "Perhaps — puzzled, and that's become fear. Nothing was taken, you see. My father had a small collection of jade, and a few items of silver. I'd packed them away — but that wouldn't have stopped a thief, would it?" Her hands were fidgeting now, stabbing in emphasis, or lying irresolutely, unrestfully, on her lap. "Anyway, I decided to stay — there were things to do, his solicitor in Sherborne—" She smiled, nervously. He sensed she had been happy here as a child and a young woman, and she wanted to absorb something of it, for the sake of the years ahead — but what had once been a good, if maudlin, idea was now making her nervous, afraid, and vulnerable.

"Why are you afraid — they won't come back. Burglary isn't like that—"

"I suppose not. It's just that—" She seemed to scrutinize him, as if to check her impulse to spill the whole story into his hands, make him share its oppressive weight. "My father, last time I was here, when he wrote to you — was certain he was being watched — he said, under surveillance, and laughed, actually." The memory warmed her for a moment, then the tears stood at her eyes, making them glisten. She seemed determined to ignore them. "He claimed it was the most interesting time of his life, since the war—"

"Why did he write me?"

"He explained — didn't he?" She seemed to have little patience to talk about his concerns.

"He wrote me like a novelist — full of mystery—" He consciously employed his most disarming smile, and she responded slowly. He noticed her nose had reddened with the restrained tears. "He said he had a visitor — did he?"

"I wasn't here that week—" In the way she spoke, there was something that made him not envy her husband. He was vying with a worshipped father who would now be beatified by memory. He hoped her husband in Bristol had learned to cope. "But I believe my father. Someone came — he said from the government in his most mysterious tone—" A slight, almost luxurious smile. "Interested in you, and your work. But he didn't explain — the visitor, I mean — and made my father very angry that he'd been warned not to talk to you—"

"What did he want to say to me, Mrs—?"

"Forbes," she said simply, announcing something of minor significance. She talked of her father much as his own mother had talked of Michael McBride, and he wondered about two men so easily, casually capable of inspiring love.

"Mrs Forbes, your father's letter intrigued me, I have to admit. But it didn't tell me anything — do you know anything?"

As he asked, he was aware again of the break-in, and the fact that the jade and silver wasn't missing. She looked thoughtful.

"It was the work he and your father were involved in — in 1940, I think. He didn't talk much about the war, funnily enough — not until this happened."

McBride realized his mouth must be open, and his eyes furiously active. She seemed frightened, as she might have been of a harmless but retarded person in the street, suddenly encountered.

"Papers — what about his papers? Were any missing?"

"I can't say — there was a mess, and I tidied it all into cardboard boxes, but I didn't know what was there.

Nothing of any importance, I'm sure. My father didn't hoard things, never kept a scrapbook, or took a lot of pictures, even when my mother was alive. He was always clearing out cupboards and drawers, throwing things away. He had a very good memory — perhaps he was just careless about who and what he once had been—?" The thought seemed to have just struck her, and she evidently found it uncomfortable.

"So you wouldn't know?" She shook her head. McBride was beginning to believe the unimportance of the burglary; it retreated in his consciousness, though he knew, dimly, that he wasn't finished with it. "The man who came to see your father — was your father frightened in any way?" She laughed out loud, then clapped her hand to her mouth as if caught in an irreverence. But she was still smiling when she uncovered her mouth.

"Of course not. My father thought him stupid, and impudent."

"And he didn't threaten your father?"

"No, why should he? Official secrets? My father hadn't learned any for forty years, Mr McBride. Would you like coffee — some lunch?" He shook his head.

"No to the lunch, yes to coffee."

While he listened to her making coffee in the kitchen, he pondered Gilliatt's death, and the frustration of this minor part of his visit to England. But, 19407 It was too coincidental.

When he had taken the delicate china cup with the heavy rose-pattern in the deep pink saucer, sipped and complimented her, he said, "Your father didn't mention exactly what it was he wanted to talk about, I suppose?" He was resigned to it being idle speculation — her answer had a startling clarity.

"He was still laughing when he told me. He said that your connection with it was the best irony. It put the wind up the people in Whitehall, he was certain of that — the same name, you see, and the blood connection. The man from London told him that you were interested in the operation my father was part of in late 1940—"

"Emerald Necklace?" he asked in a hoarse voice, the cup tilting in his hand as his attention was forced from it.

"Careful," she warned. "I'm sorry — I don't know what you mean—"

"The operation was called Emerald Necklace."

"I don't know — was it? My father didn't refer to it by name. He simply said it was to do with a German plan to invade southern Ireland, late in 1940. Are you interested in something like that?"

Sean Moynihan handed over the papers he was required to carry under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, as Peter Morgan, visitor to the Republic. He'd filled a sheaf of forms at Heathrow, which attempted to stop people like himself from travelling freely in and out of Eire.

The passport official at Cork Airport accepted the papers and the Welsh accent that Moynihan had assumed, and the single suitcase and the false passport. Outside the tiny, almost empty terminal building, Donovan was waiting for him with his car.

When they were on the L42, driving back towards Cork, and Moynihan had maintained a deliberate silence in order to irritate Donovan, the driver said, "You had a satisfactory trip, I take it?" He wiped a hand over his thinning hair, as if nervous at having trodden on some private grief.

"I did, Rory, I did." But his face portrayed only the mirror of his angry frustration at the hands of Goessler. "Herr Goessler was his usual smiling, fat, bloody self."

"Well — what did you get from him? What can we use?"

"Nothing — nothing yet."

Donovan was emboldened by disappointment. "But you promised — look, Sean, I've got the Committee on fire for some startling piece of usable information, and you come back with nothing?"

"Shut your gob and drive, Rory — you do that best."

After a silence which seemed to mist the windscreen slightly, Donovan said, "I'm sorry, but the Committee is pressing. Dublin keeps reassuring us — but we don't trust them. Gerry thinks there's a real chance they'll go along with the Brits and keep that fucking Agreement. So, we need—"

"Fuck Provisional Sinn Fein, Rory!" Moynihan snapped.

Donovan flushed angrily. "You can't talk to me like—"

"I can, Rory."

"We want next week's meetings stopped as much as you do!"

"Then you'll have to be patient. I've nothing for you — not yet. Goessler has us by the balls, Donovan, you know that."

"What's going to happen, then?"

"Goessler's set his elaborate scheme in motion—"

"McBride?"

"Yes. He's in London now. Soon, he'll be coming here, following an old, old trail—"

"How long is this going to take?" Donovan's round eyes blinked behind his thick spectacles as he looked almost desperately at Moynihan.

"Watch the cart," Moynihan said, and when they had swerved to avoid it, added, "Not too long — damn you, Donovan, I can't help it, and I don't like it, either! So Dublin goes to these meetings — OK. Those meetings will take weeks to decide, one way or the other — it'll all be out in the open before then!"

"You hope," Donovan said quietly.

"Shut up and drive."

For McBride, the bridge of HMS Bisley was of no special significance. He was being delivered back to Drummond and to his home in County Cork by the most convenient route — as part of a minesweeping flotilla. Another borrowed duffel-coat, a cap picked up at Otterbourne, someone else's seaboots, his dried roll-neck sweater — Walsingham had brought McBride's jacket, but the cap had been mislaid. He was amused at his own amateurishness, and felt no superiority of function to the first lieutenant of the minesweeper,

Gilliatt. A mild discomfort at being amongst a ship's officers and crew was always just below the surface, as if he were some sort of ignorant civilian guest — but it was a feeling that was in himself not in those around him. They accepted his uniform as proclaiming the man, and enjoyed the mystery and shadows that seemed just beyond his physical presence.

The flotilla consisted of just seven ships, moving out of Milford Haven harbour into the sound, down towards St Anne's Head. It was a grey early morning, the sea already alien, inhospitable. One of the flotilla was having her boilers cleaned, so six ships would sweep and one would act as 'spare sweeper". McBride had no interest in their objective — the Germans might have sown a new minefield by aircraft or submarine across Swansea Bay or Cardiff docks, or at Bristol. Routine, par for the course. The two dan-laying vessels had already left port to rendezvous, presumably, at the location of the sweep.

He smiled as he remembered Walsingham's words. The m/s davits, kites and floats on each side of the quarter deck of the Bisley had indeed informed him of the purpose of the big U-boats on Guernsey — minesweeping duties. They had been rigged out to sweep a minefield on the surface, he suspected now, carrying the sweep along behind them. He presumed it had something to do with keeping the U-boat pens along the French coast clear of the mines the Navy and Coastal Command had started laying. Its importance had already diminished, and the small mystery of their function, being solved, led him to no further interest. He was anxious now to get home.

"Cigarette?" Gilliatt offered him a Capstan Full Strength from a battered packet. Then he and McBride lit up. McBride sensed the proprietorial affection the lieutenant felt for the bridge, now that the captain had left it and gone below to his cabin. Gilliatt was to join him when the flotilla had passed St Anne's Head and turned away to starboard. McBride had not been invited, so he presumed it would be some kind of briefing. "On your way home, sir?" Gilliatt added casually as they stood behind the helmsman, watching St Anne's Head emerge from the early mist. Rain-squalls spattered the bridge screen. The young sub-lieutenant who was officer of the watch was in effective command of the bridge. It was therefore Gilliatt's indulgence to engage McBride in conversation.

McBride nodded. "I am. And you — you're already home?"

Gilliatt looked startled and very young, then he smiled. "You noticed," he said.

"A friend told me you were once in Admiralty Intelligence?"

"Once — a long time ago. I ran away to sea."

McBride laughed. "I try not to stay at my desk," he said. "And, before you ask, I'm Anglo-Irish. My sainted mother, God rest her soul, was a Dublin girl, and my father worked for an English firm of paper-makers. Now, does that much careless talk cost me anything?"

"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 pale winter sky without other cloud, for miles before he had reached the Surrey suburbs. Then it had taken him hours to make his way through Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Battersea, across the bridge and through Chelsea. Streets wet with fire-fightrng, coated like a new surface with broken glass, heaps of smouldering — or rescued — furniture piled on the pavements, little groups of stunned people, the occasional ambulance, and other small groups who knew what they had lost already and had abandoned hope, holes in the lines of terraced houses in so many streets — heaps of rubble over which firemen and ambulance men clambered for the sake of relatives who watched them dumbly.

They were walking now in Hungerford Lane, near Charing Cross Station, the gaunt skeleton of the railway bridge black against the sky, sombre. The station roof, too, appeared charred by recent fires rather than sooted by time and the steam engine.

"Commodore — would it be a reasonable supposition, then?" Walsingham asked at last, as if he had wearied of visual impressions, wanted now a renewed sense of purpose. He felt himself coming out of mild shock.

The Director of Minesweeping, to whom the damage of the previous night, and the prior weeks, had been a narrow burning perception of the enemy's vileness, looked at his young, small companion. Walsingham seemed troubled by doubts, but the commodore could not decide if that was a deferential pretence or merely the visible reminders of the air raid.

"I would say—" Someone passed them pushing a handcart into which were piled office chairs. The spiky, tumbled legs seemed to threaten, or defy. "Yes — yes, Commander, it would be a very reasonable supposition."

They turned down towards the Victoria Embankment, passing under the railway bridge. A train rattled over them, and out across the Thames. The noise silenced them, but the shadows under the bridge were cold, and the sound hammered down at them so that both men flinched as if deep, traumatic memories had surfaced. When the train had gone, both men smiled.

"Yes," the commodore continued. "The kind of stanchions and other new fittings you describe would certainly most likely be minesweeping equipment. It's probable that they would operate as a team of six — linked in twos, and rigged out to employ an A-sweep in a "C" formation." Walsingham appeared confused, irritated at his own shallow knowledge. The U-boats would be linked in twos, the first two in line, then the second two, then the third pair, in a "C" formation. It would give them as near as possible a one hundred per cent clearance of the channel they were sweeping." Walsingham nodded. "I can't think why they'd be based at Guernsey. Naturally, we drop mines outside their harbours, and the submarine bases in Brittany and Normandy, but Guernsey isn't especially well-placed as a base for sweeping subs, and we don't make a fuss around the Channel Islands. What is going on?"

Walsingham was not prepared to lecture the DMS on security.

"I'd rather not say at present, sir," he murmured deferentially. "It's only a theory—"

"Those bloody U-boats aren't a theory, young man. I hope you're not going to play silly buggers with this information, keep it to yourself or something equally stupid?"

Walsingham knew it was bluff. He would not tell the commodore, because he had to conserve the element of shock and surprise for his own masters in Whitehall.

"Sorry, sir, but I will be seeing my own superiors in QIC later today — and they will decide what happens next."

"Politely telling me to mind my own business," the DMS snorted, looking studiously ahead at the approaching bulk of Waterloo Bridge. He laughed, an abrupt, loud noise like indigestion. "Very well, but let me tell you this—"

He turned to Walsingham, stood with his hands on his hips like some more piratical ancestor.

"The Kriegsmarine doesn't have U-boats to spare, Commander. If there are as many as you suggest engaged in minesweeping duties, then they are sweeping to some very exact, and vitally important, purpose."

"Exactly what I was afraid of," was all Walsingham would say in reply.

McBride had wanted to stop for a while in Salisbury — the white cathedral spire across the fields summoned him from photographs and prints — but he felt energized by a restlessness of mind that prompted him to find the A338 on the other side of the city, and head towards the M4 and London. The spire flicked in and out of the driving-mirror for a time, so that he hardly attended to the news item on the car radio.

"… a police spokesman said that two men were being held in custody at Braintree police station, where it was expected that charges under the Prevention of Terrorism Act would be brought against them later today. Our reporter believes that the two men are among those wanted in connection with the London restaurant bombing…"

He switched channels as the news items of a country he hardly knew continued. Vivaldi sprang from the two speakers behind him, and he tapped at the wheel in a comfortable state of half-attention while he considered what Mrs Forbes — Gilliatt's daughter — had told him.

His own father had been in Ireland, and with Gilliatt, late in 1940, and in connection with a German invasion of Ireland. Emerald Necklace — his father had been part of it.

He had encountered few moments in his even, academic life which possessed such naked shock. Few things had impinged upon him so directly, the halting, recollected sentences of the woman in the chair opposite him beating on him rather than seeping into his consciousness. He was in the presence of events— an alternative present— rather than hearing of some dim time beyond his own experience. A curious sense of predestination assailed him, almost as misty and illogical and assertive as a religious experience. He could not cope with the information, almost ignored the name and whereabouts of the man his father had operated under — Drummond, he'd fixed it like a photographic image, the chemicals of repetition coming to his assistance — in his desire to get away from the house in Sturminster Newton and come to terms with what he had heard.

"What happened to your father I have no idea— my father, would not say, though perhaps he didn't know. But they were together in Ireland, working for Drummond, who was some kind of secret agent—"

She had smiled with apology. She believed her father, naturally, but had no sense of what he might have been doing. Certainly not figuring in some drama she might have read in a fiction.

His own reaction — now in the warm car, the Vivaldi moving crisply through its slow movement — was of a similar unreality. He was ignorant of his father's war record, but the secrecy which may have surrounded it too easily toppled into melodrama. Except that his father was connected with Smaragdenhalskette. His father was a proof of its existence.

It was growing dark by the time he reached the motorway and turned onto it. He began to make good time, looking ahead to a flight to Ireland, to meet Drummond — if he still lived south-west of Cork. It would be a simple matter to trace him, and perhaps as simple to interview him. An old man now, he would open his memory like a box of keepsakes. Somewhere under the years was his father.

McBride had no direct interest in his father — he had, during the drive, sublimated him in the publicity that would attend his new book, the son-of-the-father angle which was pure, dramatic accident. He was not on a quest for his father. Michael McBride, about whom he possessed a certain curiosity, was only one light among the decorations giving off a Christmas-tree gleam as he approached the warm room in which Emerald Necklace waited like a reward.

The minesweeper lowered him into the water, in the ship's motorboat, half a mile offshore — though officially the ship should not have entered the three-mile limit of neutral Ireland's territorial waters — and in the company of the young sub-lieutenant and a stoker in charge of the boat's noisy engine he chugged towards the unlit shore where Drummond would be waiting to pick him up. There was no element of danger, and there would be no protest from the Dublin government. Naval vessels had collected fruit, eggs, even alcohol from the coast of southern Ireland — he was just another item of barter.

He was conscious of the windless night, the almost calm sea, the fresh chill and the smell of land. He was aware of Guernsey and his frantic effort to escape, but now only as an occasion for smiling.

They slipped into low Carrigada Bay, the lights of two cottages a sighting and a welcome; the faintest glow of the village of Reagrove beyond. The lack of black-out so different from England, and — most recently — the dark, wet docks of Milford Haven as the minesweeping flotilla had forlornly set sail. Always that sense of emptiness behind the outlines of cranes, an empty country or city; and always the sense of lights, of scattered quiet lives being lived when he arrived home.

The stoker cut the engine to idling, and the boat immediately began to wallow. McBride slipped over the side, and the chill of the water struck through his sea-boots, the slopping incoming tide reaching almost to his knees.

"Good luck, sir," the young sub-lieutenant called, and McBride waved one hand as he waded through the shallows to the beach and the motorboat's engine picked up again as it turned back to the minesweeper.

The incoming tide would remove his footprints — though most of the locals would have heard the engine of the boat and guessed at its passenger — and he lengthened his stride.

He grinned in the darkness as he moved onto the soft sand above the high-tide mark, and saw Drummond waiting, calmly smoking a cigarette. He was leaning on the side of the shed where a fisherman kept his nets, his tall, lean frame relaxed, unconcerned.

"Michael?" he asked quietly.

"No," McBride replied in German. "Admiral Donitz — I'm here to look around." Drummond laughed softly in the darkness, then shook hands with McBride.

"Welcome back."

When McBride had lit the offered cigarette, Drummond headed the Morris back up the track towards the coast road. McBride settled against the leather seat, contentedly drawing in and exhaling the smoke.

"You were of use to our common masters, I take it?" Drummond asked as he turned onto the road. Lights dotted the fields around them, small as hand-held lamps, each one an uncurtained window or an open door. McBride noted them like a Victorian parent counting heads and reassuring himself his family was entirely present. Not one of those lights would not be there the following night, or the night after that—

Unless Walsingham was right. As he thought that, he was aware, also, of Drummond's half-amused question, even of the nettled irritation far back in the tones which reminded him of Drummond's dislike of loaning one of his agents to London.

"I suppose so. I just went, looked, reported, and was told to keep quiet about it. I suppose it was of some use to someone." Walsingham had told him that Drummond might be informed at a later date. For the present, he was to be told nothing. He did not even know where McBride had been.

"It's secret, of course?" Drummond asked lightly as he pulled up at the crossroads in the village of Nohaval. As expected, there were no other cars, in any direction. McBride wound down the window, and felt the cold air rush into the car.

"Apparently, Robert."

"I've got another job for you, anyway. Your real work," Drummond said as the car pulled away on the Kinsale road.

"Tomorrow, I hope—"

"Tomorrow will do. Reports of a German agent landing two nights ago by boat from a submarine— reliable reports, I hasten to add—" Drummond chuckled. McBride studied his profile. A stereotyped British naval officer, that head above the white roll-neck sweater and the dark jacket that could have been mistaken for a uniform.

"No trace since?"

"Nothing."

"Where was this?"

"Rosscarbery Bay — the other side of Galley Head. A couple of miles from your place."

"Maureen probably gave him dinner."

Drummond laughed. "You'll have a look around, and let me know?" McBride nodded. "Good. That's the third in two weeks. I wonder what's going on?"

"They could be deserting from their submarines," McBride offered before he settled back into the seat again, lighting another cigarette from Drummond's packet on the dashboard.

The tiny hamlet of Leap lay almost in darkness astride the main Clonakilty-Skibbereen road as Drummond's car pulled up outside McBride's cottage. There was light coming through flower-patterned curtains in the kitchen. Drummond's own house was a spacious, prosperous-looking white farmhouse near Kilbrittain, twenty-five miles back the way they had come, inland of the Old Head of Kinsale. Drummond had officially retired from the Royal Navy in 1934, in company with a great many officers who, at that time, believed the Royal Navy would never rearm and thus rob them of careers, and moved to Ireland, selling a small family estate in order to buy a farm in County Cork. Here, he had continued to work for Admiralty Intelligence, setting up a network of coast-watchers and intelligence gatherers along the south coast of that weak defensive flank of Britain, neutral Eire. McBride had been one of his first, and most successful, recruits.

McBride got out of the car, slammed the door for the pleasure of making a noise that would betray his presence, and walked round to Drummond's window.

"I'll get on with that in the morning," he said, and Drummond nodded.

"Good. Let me have a report in a couple of days. And take care of your health, Michael."

"I will. Thanks for the lift."

"One day you must tell me all about your trip," Drummond said lightly, then switched on the engine, and turned the car round towards Clonakilty again. He tooted noisily as he drove off, a white hand waving from the still-open Window. McBride threw away the rest of his cigarette, and approached the door of the cottage.

Maureen would never come out to greet him if Drummond were there — McBride could never decide whether it was because she was Irish rather than Anglo-Irish like himself or whether it was because she simply resented the man who took him away, placed him in danger. But then, he reminded himself, Maureen didn't like what he did for all sorts of reasons, not least of which was her father's lifelong acquaintance with the IRA. He smiled as he pushed open the door, latched it again behind him — but the smile was saddened, as if he were suddenly burdened with an unpleasant freight of unwished-for complications amid his homecoming.

Maureen emerged from the kitchen into the lamp-lit gloom and warmth of the living-room, her arms white with flour, apron on. She wore her domesticity like an irritant or a disguise; a posture of which he was well aware. She seemed to desire to be nothing much to come home to, have no special place in his mind or affections. The little woman, he told himself as he stood watching her and she did not move from the kitchen door. Since the war, since he had begun working for Drummond and the British — not so much a reproof or disapproval; rather a slight distancing, more in case he got killed than because she objected. She was more comfortable inside an unpretentious outer covering — nothing overwhelming would happen to a woman like her.

"Hello — you're not cooking at this time of night, surely?" he said, taking off his coat and throwing it onto a chair. He moved to the fire, rubbing his hands, then turning his back to it as if chilled, waiting for her to move to him.

"I expect you can eat it," she offered grudgingly. He watched her inspect his body, seeing through the clothes, for new marks, new contours violence might have drawn. He remembered her horror at a knife-wound across his ribs that had bled badly — and she hadn't asked what he'd done to the German, ever. It had happened on a beach east of Cork, early in 1940. Even now, she avoided looking at him as he washed or shaved stripped to the waist, and when they made love her hands hovered near, but never caressed, the scar.

"I can. What is it?"

"A pie." She wiped her arms with a towel, removing the worst of the flour as if she were removing a disguise. Then she came to him in front of the fire, and put her face up to be kissed. He looked down at the small features, the auburn hair which framed them, the parchment skin that looked somehow raw-boned and stretched, typically Irish. He bent his head, kissed her, squeezing his arms so that he pressed her body against him. He felt suddenly guilty as he stroked her hair as she leaned against his chest. He had been a painter when they met, just finished art school and with a few small commissions from rich dog-owners and one or two advertising companies trying to encourage cheap new talent. There was a studio upstairs, next to the bedroom, and an exhibition of unsold landscapes and portraits of Maureen in the loft. But he had found himself a natural spy, an adventurer, almost in the first days after recruitment by Drummond — one slight pang as if he were betraying his past, or his wife, and then he had leapt into the secret life. Each time he measured her smallness in his arms, he felt guilty again for what he had discovered of himself. He had lain in the room of his own life like an unused weapon until another war required his services. A natural.

"I love you," he whispered, and she pressed her cheek closer to his chest. He stared at the furniture of the room as if appraising its value.

Rear Admiral Robert Evelyn Drummond, RN Retd, still lived at Crosswinds Farm, County Cork. It had taken only a couple of telephone calls, and a visit to a branch library in Bloomsbury for a Cork Area telephone directory, to locate him. The Admiralty were pleased to confirm his continued existence in good health, though they would not immediately release his address without some personal details.

McBride had determined not to telephone Drummond before he reached Cork, but instead simply to visit him as the son of Michael McBride — letting surprise and perhaps even pleasure spring the lock on the memory-box. He anticipated no difficulties with Drummond.

As he changed flights at Dublin Airport for the flight to Cork, he was unaware of being watched. When he left the Aer Lingus Viscount at Cork Airport and passed through Customs, he did not see Moynihan sitting at the cramped and tiny snack bar, reading a copy of the Cork Examiner. But Moynihan saw him, logging his arrival with a nod to two other men in the passenger lounge who followed McBride out, watched him pick up his Hertz car, and drove after him into Cork.

Later, Moynihan drove down to Kilbrittain and booked into the one small hotel in the village. The next day, he expected McBride to call on Drummond and his daughter at Crosswinds Farm.

CHAPTER FIVE Open Door

McBride squatted on his haunches, staring at the seaweed wrack, the splinters of wood, the old bottle, the shells where he had brushed his hand across the soft white sand above the reach of the tide in Rosscarbery Bay. He smiled, squeezed the wrack so that one of its dry pods burst with a flat cracking noise, and wished that Drummond's reported German agent had left an evident, unmistakable sign of his passage. McBride was working his way from Galley Head and Dundeady Island west around the bay. The stiff little wind rustled and whisked the sand, and carried the smell of exposed mud now that the tide was well out.

No, he didn't wish it. Perhaps just the slenderest clue, the momentary glimpse as if through a door-crack into the agent's mind — and then the slow, building pursuit. He breathed in deeply, engaged in something more fierce — more enmeshing — than his love-making with Maureen late in the night. Maureen had been tidied to one part of his mind again, her habitual and appointed residence, fuzzy and localized like a snapshot of some place in the past. Yet he loved her as he had loved no other woman, and would love no other. He never discussed with himself the weight of that love, or its importance in the entirety of his awareness.

He had pondered, at first, whether the war had distracted him from his marriage; but, remembering the caged days in the studio-attic in Cork, the search for this cottage in Leap, the restlessness of the days in the bedroom he then used as a studio — he knew that perhaps the war had saved his relationship with Maureen. She had become only a necessary fraction of his life, placed in proportion; he thought that she, too, had accepted that he was somehow disabled from accepting the completeness of a life that centred on the domestic, on a relationship.

This bed thy centre is— He stood up, shrugging the Donne from his mind. The German agent — if indeed one had landed three nights before — would have left no traces, unless he was somehow careless. The float would be buried or hidden inland, and if he was anywhere in the area still, he would have registered at an inn in a plausible disguise or be staying with one of the fellow-travellers who expected a Nazi victory.

He walked slowly through the soft sand, head down, eyes casting about for something out of place. The smoothness of sand where the belly of a dragged float had passed, one half-erased footprint missed in the night—

McBride was a hunter. Something Drummond kept in a kennel until there was a man who needed hunting down. German agents had been landed in southern Ireland, along the Cork coast, since 1937 or "38, most of them taking the quick route north either to Dublin to cross on the ferry as native and neutral Irish to Liverpool; or into Ulster and from Belfast to England. In either case, the object was the same — spying on Britain.

Until perhaps three or four months ago, when McBride had found a dead body on the beach — drowned when his float capsized in a rough sea — carrying papers which gave his nationality as Irish, and which would not have fitted him to cross to mainland Britain, but rather would have suited a resident of the Republic.

Since then, rumours, traces — in one case a killing — of agents who were staying in the Cork and Kerry areas, possibly being taken off again by submarine the way they had come. Rumours of men with assumed English identities — painters, bird-watchers, travellers, students. Swallowed by the damp, musty County Cork earth, for all the hard evidence.

The sun was well up — the day bright, hard as steel against his face, the low hills behind the bay sharp in the dry, frosty air, the sea smooth beyond the exposed mud flat — by the time he reached the point where the road bordered the beach, which itself narrowed to a thin, grey strip. He had found nothing, and wondered whether he might temporarily abandon his search and check Ross Carbery itself, sprawled haphazardly on the far bank of the bay's narrow inlet at the mouth of a lazy river. An agent with the right papers might have gone into the village — they were walking up to the front door these days, after all—

He climbed the steps up to the sea wall and the road, his eyes alert as if he expected to see an unfamiliar ornithologist or cyclist. He walked up to the main road from Clonakilty, along which he had been driven by Drummond the previous evening. He felt almost light-hearted, in spite of his wasted morning, and he whistled to himself, hands thrust for warmth in the pockets of his donkey-jacket. He was happy in his work, and he was working again. Walsingham and his concern with Guernsey had receded in his imagination.

A pony-trap caught up with him just before he reached the bridge across the inlet to Ross Carbery. He turned, and his face darkened as he saw the driver was his father-in-law, Devlin, the principal grocer in the village. Devlin, who must have recognized his walk, his posture, still adopted no conciliatory face. He'd been delivering to the farms, perhaps, and was as reluctant about the encounter as McBride.

"Good-day, Da," McBride said, squinting with the sunlight and perhaps with irony.

"Michael — good-day." McBride observed Devlin's thick neck, the squat body which he could never decide was actual or merely the visual exaggeration prompted by his dislike of the man. In the end, Devlin's Republican politics; his short-changing, his bully's air were little alongside the man's voice, gestures, shape. "How is Maureen?"

McBride climbed up beside the man, acting out their mutual parody of propinquity. Devlin clucked the pony into movement, shaking the reins on its back.

"Maureen's fine."

"You've been away, then?" Devlin continued as the cart moved onto the narrow road bridge. A bull-nose Morris squeezed past it.

"My aunt in Dublin — sick again. You know how it is, Da, when they get old—" Neither of them believed, but both normally accepted, the fiction of his behaviour. Devlin certainly knew that McBride worked for the British, and despised him for it. McBride, for his part, had nothing but contempt for the narrow, bigoted, unrealizable aspirations of the IRA. Sometimes, he wondered when some of Devlin's more outspoken, and less cowardly, acquaintances would get around to an attempt on his life — as a traitor to something-or-other.

"Ah," was all Devlin replied.

"Any strangers in Ross Carbery in the last three days?" McBride asked, studying the pony's rump intently.

Devlin was silent almost all the way across the bridge, then he said: "I haven't heard."

"The lads about as usual, then?"

"They are."

"All of them?" Devlin steered the pony into an alleyway off the main street of Ross Carbery, to the yard behind his shop. He grunted as if it took all his physical strength to control the docile animal. He did not look at McBride, who suspected he was lying.

Devlin provided him with information as readily as if McBride threatened his daughter in some obscure and violent way. He did it, however, simply out of his own fear of Maureen's husband — perhaps even out of fear of Maureen herself. The IRA, for some strange reason, did not frighten him. He did not inform on them, anyway, and the British had lost interest for the moment. McBride had never threatened or coerced. There had been no need.

"Now, Da — anything, anything at all?"

Devlin reversed the pony and trap, then climbed down. He looked up at McBride. His eyes shifted guiltily.

"Someone—" He cleared his throat. "Someone is buying groceries for two—" He choked off any amplification of the bare fact.

"You're sure?"

"I am — twice as much bacon, eggs. Isn't that enough?"

"One of the lads?"

Devlin shook his head vehemently. "No!"

"Da — I don't want him, just his guest." Devlin swallowed, shook his head again. "Come on, Da. His guest won't be Irish, he'll be German—"

Devlin erupted in unaccustomed defiance. Someone had recently warned him about talking to his son-in-law, evidently. The truce was over, and McBride wondered at the reason behind it.

"No, damn you, no! No more than that — find the man yourself, if you want him that much!"

McBride skipped down from the trap, stood before Devlin.

"It's all right, Da — I'll look after you." He felt no reluctance in saying it. Devlin he disliked — but the threat encompassed him, Maureen and her father alike. Devlin hesitated, then nodded. McBride understood his relief. Somehow, just as he was more afraid of him, Devlin regarded him as stronger, more powerful than the IRA men he knew. It wasn't much like respect, but it was a recognition of superiority. "One of the lads, Da. OK, I'll find him—" He frowned. "And what do the silly buggers think they're up to, Da — playing with the Germans? They'll get their fingers burned."

But Devlin, reassured, retreated from a moment close to intimacy. He merely shrugged and readopted his habitual sour face.

Walsingham paused outside the door of Room T of the Admiralty main building, as if to take a deep mental breath. He tucked the buff folders more firmly under his left arm, yet his hand still refused to turn the door handle. The green stripe of the RNVR(S) between the gold on his cuff now mocked him. At the bottom of some great steep mental slope, he looked up, daunted. He felt little more confident of success than some harmless crank who continually reported the landing of creatures from outer space to the local police.

Then he opened the door, and went in. Rear Admiral March was waiting for him, seated at the far end of the long polished walnut conference table of Room T's main office — other, smaller rooms waited behind the half dozen doors off this main room, where March's Section II of Admiralty OIC seemed to lie in wait for him. March smiled at his entry, gestured to him to join him at the far end of the table.

"Charles — sit down, my boy." Then he immediately looked at his watch, as if impatient of missing another appointment elsewhere. "What can we do for you in Section II?" A distance was marked between them. March was Walsingham's superior, Walsingham was on the strength of Section II, but now he was being made to feel an outsider. His civilian intelligence background, the green RNVR(S) stripe, was again a matter of importance, and being used to dissociate him from the naval staff with whom he worked.

"My — Irish business, sir," Walsingham began, sitting down, opening the top folder. March looked bored almost at once, hardly glancing at the aerial pictures he had seen before or the reports that lay beneath them.

"You've been talking to DMS, I gather," March said in a spirit of surprised offence. "Interesting?"

"Sir, the Director will submit a report to this office as soon as he can, based on our conversation—"

"And you led him by the nose, I suppose?" The Admiral's face creased in a humourless smile. A narrow face, the pitted skin of which was leathery, blue-jowled. Dark, probing eyes, thick grey eyebrows which seemed perpetually lifted in disbelief. "Come, come, Charles, no pouting. I know you. DMS no doubt supports your cock-eyed theory simply because he doesn't know any better."

"Sir," Walsingham said in a tight, smoothed tone. "DMS agreed that what my agent had seen was quite probably a group of minesweeping submarines in Guernsey—"

"This agent — Irish, isn't he?"

"Anglo-Irish, for all it matters. He is reliable—"

"Charles, look out of any one of these tall windows. It is November outside—" As if in sympathy with Walsingham, weak sunlight bloomed on the carpet on the other side of the elegant room, revealing its faded pattern. But, almost immediately, a heavy cloud removed it. It would rain before the afternoon was over. It was cold in the room, despite the huge radiators and the coal fire. "No seaborne invasion plan — such as you propose — would be seriously entered into by the Germans. When we knew Hitler had canceled Sea Lion in October, we also knew we were safe from the sea. The invasion you suggest is impossible."

Walsingham's boyish face narrowed as if he had sucked a lemon. In a moment, he would again be reminded of his lack of experience in naval matters. "Sir, I admit it is unlikely. But not that it is impossible."

March looked at the folders, the original aerial pictures of the newly erected sheds in Guernsey harbour, and the digest of McBride's debriefing beneath them, clipped to them.

"I see. Your man has provided fresh evidence, I take it — hence your persistence?"

"Sir, I request you read his report, and my account of what the DMS had to say." Walsingham realized his knuckles were a strained white as they rested on the table. He removed his hands.

"Very well, Charles, I'll read it. But you're wrong, you know. Utterly wrong."

Crosswinds Farm was an easy house to find on the southern side of the hamlet of Kilbrittam. Solid, white, almost italianate with its red roof and surrounding fruit trees. It was situated on a knoll, looking north to the hamlet and the hills towards Bandon, south over Courtmacsharry Bay and the Old Head of Kinsale. McBride turned the rented car off the narrow, hedged road, up the track to the farmhouse. Friesian cattle watched him over a newly painted wooden fence. As he pulled up before the house, a woman was waiting for him — presumably Drummond's daughter with whom he had already spoken on the telephone.

She moved confidently towards the car, extended one hand and shook his in a firm grip. Mid thirties, he estimated, some instinct making him study her hands for rings. No wedding ring. When he looked up again, she was smiling sardonically, blue eyes amused, yet appraising. Then she brushed her dark hair away from her cheek, and beckoned him towards the house. She was dressed in denims and a pale green sweater over a blouse. A green scarf knotted at her throat. McBride found her immediately attractive, and somehow off-putting, as if a great deal had already passed between them, and her judgment of him had already been made. As if he had been expected for a long time in her life, and she might already have defined and placed him.

He followed her into the house — dark wood panels, a heavy staircase that turned out of sight, polished floors with splashes of bright rug. She led him through the square hall into a large room that looked north towards Bandon and the low green hills where the shadows of clouds chased across their contours, swallowing sheep and cattle, white farms, trees. The view became sinister in an unexpected and inexplicable way the moment he saw it, and Drummond rose from his chair at the side of the big window, hand out. He smiled.

"Admiral," he said. Sunlight on the scene again.

"No formalities," Drummond said easily, waving him to a chair opposite his own, sitting down again himself, at ease, comfortable. Drummond was tall, grey-haired, cleanshaven. The skin was mottled with age, as it was on the backs of his hands, but it was drawn tight on the fine bones. His eyes were clear, his gaze steady. Though McBride knew he must be close to eighty, he appeared still vigorous. Only the ebony cane with the silver fox's head which he had used to get up quickly marked age, infirmity. McBride could understand how the man had successfully run an intelligence network in Ireland more than forty years before.

Then he was struck by the sense that this man had known his father. Not just Gilliatt, and Emerald Necklace, perhaps — but his own father. Drummond's disconcertingly complete appraisal of him, imitating his daughter's intent look, reminded him of it. Drummond was looking for a likeness. He nodded.

"You are like him, Mr McBride — your father, I mean." Then he seemed to notice his daughter for the first time. "Drink, Mr McBride? Claire?"

"Coffee would be fine."

The woman went out of the room. McBride's smile stretched, became strained under the continuing close scrutiny. Eventually, Drummond's gaze released him.

"I'm sorry, McBride. You do remind me of him, very clearly. I am being made aware of how damned old I've got, and how long ago it all was! Forgive me."

"You knew my father well—" It was not a question, and it was not the conversation that McBride had wanted to begin. Yet he sensed the life of memory in the upright, preserved old man, and something reached out to meet it, comprehend it. He suddenly had an intuition that the old man would tell him nothing without being asked.

"Yes, I did. He worked for my little organization for some time, until—" Drummond shook his head, watched his daughter bring the fine bone china, the coffee. She served McBride with sugar-lumps from a silver bowl, with small silver tongs. He studied her strong hands, caught her perfume as she moved away again. She and her father disconcerted him, but he could not say precisely how or why. Formidable, perhaps?

"Thank you," he murmured, and attended to Drummond, silently urging him on. "What happened, sir?"

"To your father?" Drummond replied, watching his daughter pouring his coffee with the greediness of the old.

"Yes."

"You don't know, then? Your mother, I mean—" He sipped at the coffee, took two of the biscuits and rested them in his saucer.

"My mother—" He looked at Claire Drummond, who had seated herself on the sofa, crossed her legs, and taken up the posture of an intent spectator. Disconcerting. "My mother told me nothing about my father, except that he died, before I was born. How and why I don't know."

"And you never bothered to ask?" Drummond supplied quietly. "But now, in front of a mummified old man—" Claire Drummond smiled — "you are reminded of your ignorance, and intrigued to know more. Mm?" He sipped again at his coffee. McBride heard his dentures click against the rim of the cup. He felt taken over, subordinated, by the old man and his daughter.

"Do you know what happened, sir?"

Drummond shook his head. "I was in London — one of my rare trips, I'm glad to say. There was one hell of a flap on—"

More to reassert himself than to raise the matter, McBride blurted out: "Smaragdenhalskette, you mean?" Drummond's eyes narrowed, more than anything at the German, McBride surmised.

Drummond nodded.

"I thought you must know quite a bit of it, when you rang," Drummond observed." The German invasion plan, eh?" McBride nodded. "Yes, your father was mixed up in it, in a way. So was I — and young Peter Gilliatt. But I'm not the one to be able to tell you—" He smiled at McBride's complete and child-like disappointment, his comical expression. "I wasn't privy to all of it, by any manner. It was masterminded — if you can call it that — from London by a man named Walsingham in Admiralty Intelligence."

"But my father—?" The remainder of his coffee had grown a skin and he put his cup on a delicate side-table the woman had moved close to his chair.

"Your father used to run off and do errands for Walsingham — and I was told nothing, I'm afraid. I know we were running around here like mad things during late November — about the time your father died — scared stiff the Germans were going to come, agents landing on every tide, that sort of thing, rumours of parachutists and so on, but nothing ever came of it, I'm afraid." McBride looked devastated. "I'm sorry about this, Professor McBride. You seemed to want to talk about your father when you rang — I was glad to be able to help, meet his son. But this other matter— I'm in almost as much ignorance as you, I'm afraid. I don't really know what happened here for almost a week before your father — died. I was in London, advising the Admiralty on this Irish thing. Without being told very much, I'm afraid."

He finished his coffee, put it down, bit a biscuit in half.

"My father, then—" McBride asked, his disappointment evident, interest in his father minimal, mere politeness. "What happened to him? Do you know that, sir?"

"My investigations — on my return here — led me to the conclusion that he was murdered by the IRA," Drummond said levelly. Claire Drummond's head twitched as if her father had slapped her face.

At seven-thirty McBride was waiting for Claire Drummond in the bar of the one small hotel in Kilbrittain. The impulse to ask her to join him for dinner at the hotel had been simply that — a way of retaining some contact with Drummond rather than with the woman. Drummond had closed the conversation soon after the revelation of the manner of his father's death. He had ascertained as much from his network; the body had never been found. McBride's father had had more than one brush with the local IRA, who sometimes helped German agents hide out, fed them, sent them on their way to Dublin and the British mainland. Presumably, they had exacted the price of his interference, his contempt and animosity towards the Republican movement. Drummond had warned him often, but McBride had always disregarded the threat posed to him by the IRA.

Drummond had been — forty years later— visibly moved by the narrative of Michael McBride's demise. Yes, Gilliatt had later helped his pregnant mother over to England, thence to neutral America where she claimed to have distant relatives. Drummond knew no more of her than that.

Nor did he know anything more of Emerald Necklace. McBride was absorbed by the news of his father, and pressed few questions on Drummond during the rest of their conversation. He felt almost helplessly drawn to his father by Drummond's ignorance of the manner and detail of his death. The mention of IRA brought images of a hands-bound, kneeling figure, head hooded, being executed on a barren spot of country, bones growing white in passing seasons, namelessness—

He could not take his book, or himself, seriously. His own ignorance, his mother's silence, seemed exaggerated and derided by Drummond's lack of knowledge. Somehow, he felt they had all let his unknown father die, were all responsible for the namelessness of it.

Men in London, Drummond had added. He must pursue his researches in London. Many of them were dead, but Admiralty records might turn something up, Walsingham was still at the Home Office, so Drummond believed—

But London was distant. Within maybe even ten — twenty? — miles of where they had talked, where he now sat, his father had died. He felt immeasurably sad, weighted with emotion that seemed to be attempting to catch up with itself, make up for lost time — to apologize for the years of light, dismissive feelings towards Michael McBride. He did not expect to be able to do anything; he expected only not to return to London. He felt he must not leave County Cork just in case his present, ennobling emotions deserted him with a change of location. But, what to do?

Claire Drummond walked into the bar, brushing at her heavy dark hair, dressed now in a fur jacket and a dark skirt, and long boots. He smiled, — was about to rise, offer a drink before dinner, replenish his own whiskey, when she transferred her smile to the only other man in the room, the studiously-reading man at the bar.

"Sean!" They embraced, kissed lightly, studied one another in an acquaintance from which he was excluded. "How long have you been in Kilbrittain?" she asked disapprovingly. Before he could reply, however, she turned to McBride. "Mr McBride, this is Sean Moynihan, an old friend of mine." Moynihan smiled, extending his hand.

Michael McBride was drinking in a bar in Clonakilty — the uncarpeted public bar of a grey, dilapidated building that presented itself, rather unsuccessfully, as a residential hotel. The bar was sparsely populated in the early evening, the rain sliding down the uncurtained, grimy windows behind his head, the spilled beer gleaming in wet rings on the stained wooden table. He felt a covert excitement simply in being there. The hotel was known as an IRA meeting-place, — had been since the twenties, and he was awaiting the arrival of a man called Rourke who was a known and vociferous Republican. He lived in an isolated cottage north of Ross Carbery, but had lately been doing his drinking in Clonakilty.

And McBride knew, by a process of elimination that had taken him the best part of two days, that Rourke was the man with the sudden increase of grocery purchases. Words picked up, rumours, friends who had not seen Rourke for a couple of days, changes of habit, a stranger who was a cousin from Killarney — McBride had narrowed the field until there was only Rourke. And his stranger-friend-relative.

If the man was German, then McBride would have him.

He studied the barman's bald head in the Guinness-advert mirror behind the bar, watched him move into paler reflection of the glass in front of a cigarette advert framed and hung like a work of art. The barman was aware of McBride's unwelcome status as a stranger. A heavy-set man had come out of a back room, at his invitation, and studied McBride malevolently for whole minutes before disappearing again. McBride enjoyed the silent encounter, the ripples he was causing on this Republican pond. Other men studied him from time to time, but lost interest in his bland and silent exterior. He looked, sitting against the wall on a wooden bench, unthreatening. The possibility of his being a police informer could be decided by others.

As he was buying his third pint of chilly, flat bitter, Rourke came into the bar with another man. Short, dark, possibly Irish. McBride was immediately disappointed, until he corrected himself in amusement. No Prussian-officer-looking German would be sent to Ireland, anyway. He returned to his seat, the barman's eyes on him as Rourke introduced his cousin Mike to the regulars. It was a charade, McBride concluded, a small, intense excitement nagging at his stomach, making him belch quietly. The barman seemed concerned to draw Rourke's attention to McBride. Eventually, Rourke turned his back to the bar, raised his glass while he studied McBride. He recognized him from Ross Carbery, and his connection with Devlin passed clear as a signal across Rourke's broad, lumpy face. His eyes narrowed.

"Good evening to you, Mr Rourke — and to your cousin," McBride said amiably, raising his glass. The barman seemed to relax at once, then become more suspicious.

"McBride," Rourke replied, putting down his glass, seeming at a loss. Almost visibly searching for a bolt-hole. Then the familiar territory of the bar seemed to reassert itself. McBride was on his own, impotent. The "cousin" seemed puzzled yet cognizant of some unease, even danger. He studied McBride, met his eyes for a moment when mutual professionalism passed between them like some Masonic recognition, then turned back to the bar and began whispering to Rourke.

McBride stood up, his drink half-finished, and headed for the lavatory at the back of the hotel. As he emerged into the wet night, he was immediately aware of the stench from the urinal, the path wet and slippery under his feet, the noise of a passing car, the screech of a fiddle from an upstairs room. He was more aware, had shed a skin, felt the night dangerous and close around him. He went into the concrete urinal, feeling for a light-switch he suspected was not there, his hand scraping lightly across the rough brick of the wall. The poor light of one distant round-the-corner street lamp. He stood, shoulders hunched, waiting.

The big shadow of a man, blocking the poor light at the corner of McBride's eye. The heavy-set man from the back room. McBride whistled softly, as if slightly embarrassed at his proximity. Then he made as if to pass the big man, who suddenly blocked his exit.

"Something troubling you?" McBride asked pleasantly, tensing himself as the big man stepped back, allowing him to pass out of the urinal. McBride took two steps, hunched himself suddenly, and stepped to one side. The kidney-punch caught him a half-blow in the side, and he gasped. Then the man was on him in the yard, reaching his arms round him, seeking to aim a blow head-against-head, knee moving to strike the groin. Dirty, untidy fighting, just in case McBride was an expert.

McBride felt himself losing balance, his feet scrabbling to retain purchase on the wet ground as the big man grabbed him, paining his ribs, making breathing difficult, noisy. McBride kept his head back, trying to avoid being stunned by a blow from the big man's forehead.

Smell of dried sweat, old unwashed clothes, a meal on the man's breath. McBride's feet came up from the concrete as the man lifted him.

McBride had gone into his embrace with one arm crooked against his chest, as if it were being carried in a sling. Now, as the man's head jabbed closer again, catching McBride on the chin and grinding his teeth together, he stabbed back as the nostrils moved into vision. He jammed his fingers into them, raking outwards. The man screamed in pain. McBride dropped to the floor, gagging for breath, then rose to one knee and drove his head into the man's abdomen, knocking him over. Noise of a gun skittering across the concrete, dislodged as the big man went down. McBride kicked him in the side of the head, carefully and weightedly, then leaned over him, recovering as if from a distance race.

When his breathing became easier, he dragged the unconscious man behind the urinal, and let him drop behind a heap of beer-crates. The man wasn't dead — McBride would have regretted the unnecessary force needed to kill which might have been forced upon him by sheer physical size. He did not consider the possibility of some vendetta having been created in this wet, dark yard between himself and the IRA.

He heard an engine start up, a car pull away. Rourke and his cousin, presumably, heading back to Ross Carbery. Then, suddenly, he knew what was on the point of happening, and he began running out of the hotel yard towards the motorcycle he had left in a ditch on the outskirts of Clonakilty.

Rourke was in the outhouse, with the scent of stored apples and a hidden poteen still and two sacks of potatoes. He'd been killed with a narrow sharp knife that might have served as an advertisement of the killer's nationality and profession. The blade had been inserted between the fourth and fifth ribs, and thrust into the heart. When it was removed, not much blood had emerged. Far less, McBride thought as he knelt over the body, than had drenched Caesar or dyed Agamemnon's bathtub. But those two had been killed by amateurs.

McBride felt the short hair on the back of his neck rise, as if the German were still in the outhouse, or the cottage, or behind the nearest knoll. He assumed he'd be long gone, over the hills and far away, but he left the body and began a methodical search of the cottage. The stone walls seemed damp, the cottage long empty and uninhabited.

The German had slept in the one bedroom, Rourke on the sofa, presumably. Supplies — courtesy of Devlin — had been laid in for an extended stay, possibly two weeks or more, and there was drink in abundance which wasn't poteen but beer and Old Bushmills. The German had refused to drink the stuff Rourke made in his outhouse. No maps, no radio, no clothes — except a rolled-up pair of socks that had been missed under the bed — no sign that the German would come back.

Would he?

Surely not — not for his socks, and if he had a radio, it wouldn't be buried at the house. He was running—

Was he? Why? Because of one man, someone Rourke knew, seen briefly in a bar in Clonakilty and presumed to have been removed like a mote from his eye?

And then McBride knew that the German was outside somewhere, waiting. Had seen and heard McBride arrive, had hidden the evidence of his presence as casually as he had removed the body to the outhouse—

And was now waiting to move in.

McBride shivered. He knew it — knew it. This was too good a place to abandon, even when the terrified Rourke had been disposed of. He was out there, somewhere—

His head snapped round as he caught the light splashing on the cottage's stone wall — fiery red, followed by the crump of the explosion.

A theatrical announcement by the German, blowing up the petrol tank of the motorbike. The challenge issued, the threat made. He was outside.

Ashe could see Gilliatt down on the sweep deck of HMS Bisley, picking up the quarter deck telephone. He watched the sweep deck crew — the Buffer, the Chief Stoker and another stoker, a leading seaman and four ordinary seamen — at their stations, then he very consciously cleared his throat into the bridge telephone. He felt the insides of his mouth dry and old like an uninhabited cave, and sucked spit from his cheeks.

"Number One, prepare to sweep in "J" formation to port. Set for deep sweep, twenty-five fathoms."

"Aye, aye sir." Ashe watched him repeat the orders to the sweep deck crew, and in the moment before any man moved, Ashe envisaged the whole scene before him, and political horizons beyond. The Bisley was rolling gently with the swell in the grey dawn, the rest of the flotilla lying astern in echelon formation. Bisley would begin the sweep, moving ahead with extreme caution into a known minefield. Each ship of the flotilla would follow astern, safe in an already swept overlap, sweeping a similar safe area for the ship astern of it. The trawlers with which the flotilla had made rendezvous were in the shadow of each minesweeper, marksmen aboard each one to destroy the cut mines by gunfire when they bobbed like shiny black snails to the surface. When the initial sweep through Winston's Welcome Mat had been made, the flotilla would turn and make another sweep back on a north-easterly course to widen the channel for the cruiser and its three merchant ships.

A more misty perspective, colder and more disheartening, lay behind the solidity of apparently unmoving men on the sweep deck, unmoving ships on a grey sea. Ashe's flotilla was opening a path to the heart of Britain, and he could not avoid the grandiose imagery because his fear, even despair, was similarly large, pressing down on his shoulders like grief or age. He tried to rid himself of his mood by shaking his head, but it persisted like a cataract over the eye, requiring surgery and not mere resolution.

Gilliatt heard the reluctance in Ashe's voice even in the tinnily distorted tones that came from the telephone. For him the horizon was bounded by the sweep deck, and the eight men on it with him. Beyond that, only the sense of the ship's bow moving through dangerous water, cutting deep enough to contact one of the black mines reaching up from its sinker on its thin wire towards the Bisley's hull. The fear was suddenly bilious in his throat and then he swallowed it and it was gone. It was an almost controlled habit of fear every time they began a sweep— every man on the sweep deck, aboard Bisley and in the flotilla shared it — but one which was familiar and transient.

The chief petty officer in charge of the sweep deck under Gilliatt stood next to him, his horizons only those of hands and procedures and techniques and implements. Gilliatt nodded to him, and he began snapping out his orders. Each man was suddenly aware of the forward movement of the minesweeper. The sweep wire, which would cut the wires holding the mines beneath the surface, was run from the port winch to the bollards, and then the port davit lifted the multiplane otter — looking like a child's elaborate sled — to the stern for the sweep wire to be shackled to it. Then the float wire was attached to the heavy Oropesa float, and a seaman checked that the float's flag was secure. In a calm sea, the men worked with the uninterrupted smoothness of a shore drill or of machines. Then the float wire was attached to the otter, which would move through the water, beneath the surface, controlling the depth and passage of the serrated sweep wire.

When they had attached the sweep wire to its companion implements, Gilliatt spoke into the telephone.

"Sweeping deck closed up and sweep ready for streaming, sir."

Then he moved cautiously, like a factory inspector, around the float on its chocks, the suspended otter, the winches and tackle. One last look. He returned to the telephone. Ashe's voice was still tinny and unsubstantial but less colourless and afraid. Oiled by routine.

"Stand by to stream, Number One."

"Hoist float and turn outboard," Gilliatt ordered the Buffer, who bellowed the order.

"Stand by ready to slip," Ashe ordered.

"Stand by, Chief Stoker."

"All hands, clear of wires," the Chief Stoker yelled, an excitable Londoner who enjoyed his authority on the sweep deck.

"Stream sweep," Ashe ordered over the telephone.

"Watch your hands, Jarvis!" the Buffer yelled at one of the young seamen hoisting the Oropesa float. The calm sea had made him careless, or perhaps his nerves were worse because he knew for certain that the mines were there. His white face glanced thankfully towards the Buffer. The float was now suspended above the side of the minesweeper, the crewmen reaching up, arms outstretched in supplication as they steadied the float, appeasing some god with this committal of the float to the sea.

"Aye aye, sir." Gilliatt yelled direct to the sweep party. "Lower float and slip!"

The float hovered outboard, then moved gently, sedately down to the surface of the water.

"Float clear, sir!" the Buffer called from the ship's side.

"Stream sweep, Chief Stoker," Gilliatt ordered.

The otter rattled against the stern before it entered the water. The serrated sweep wire sped easily over the racing bollard, down into the green water after the float and the otter. The Buffer stood near the sliding wire, which was marked at intervals, calling back the marks to Gilliatt.

"One hundred fathoms, sir." The wire slid on, alive and eager. Removed and independent from them. The float was moving away and out from them suggesting the great and increasing arc of the sweep wire between it and the ship. "Two hundred fathoms, sir."

"Good. Check speed, Chief Stoker."

The float bucked like a prancing thing, a whale's back or a porpoise celebrating life, then it settled and moved across the quarter in a wide arc to port.

"Another hundred fathoms, gently, Chief!"

The float checked again as the sweep wire slackened.

"Three hundred fathoms, sir!" the Buffer yelled.

"Check, check, check, Chief."

"Winch brake on, sir!"

"Very good, Chief."

"Sweep wire taut, sir!" the Buffer called.

"Lower away kite, gently, Chief."

The kite was lowered over the stern. It was a second otter, to hold the sweep wire at the required depth, acting in concert with the otter beneath the float at the other end of the great arc of the sweep wire. The Chief Stoker called the depth of the sinking kite.

"Five fathoms, sir — ten fathoms — twenty fathoms, sir—"

"Easy, Chief."

"Twenty-five, sir."

"Secure kite wire, Chief."

"Float running well," the Buffer volunteered.

Gilliatt lifted his binoculars and checked the distant float as it rode steadily out on the port quarter, ahead of the second ship in the "J" formation, HMS Knap Hill. He knew just how the float should move through the water, and he had taken to the expertise of minesweeping gladly and enthusiastically after the deadening years of desk-bound intelligence work. The float rode like a thoroughbred — it was all right. Satisfied, he picked up the telephone.

"Sweep running smoothly at twenty-five fathoms, with three hundred fathoms of sweep wire streamed, sir."

"Very good, Number One. Post look-outs and report immediately any mines cut. We're not even sure of the density of this field — the tide could have shifted a few, but they should be in good nick. Pilot will plot every one cut."

"Aye, aye, sir. I'll stay on the sweep deck for this lap. We may lose an otter or a kite. Sweeping our mines must be different from sweeping Jerry's!"

Gilliatt watched Knap Hill steaming cautiously, safely ahead in the arc of Bisley's sweep wire. He had no reluctance concerning his position as First Lieutenant aboard the flotilla leader, admitting rather the subtle, almost febrile, nerve of pleasure because his ship led the sweep, every time. Something close to the edge.

The flotilla moved steadily into the field. Gilliatt kept his glasses trained astern for an interminable space of minutes — aware of the bulk of the minesweeper at his back, thrusting ahead as if throwing out some obscure and ill-calculated challenge — and then he saw a mine bob to the surface, winking in and out of sight with the slight swell. The solid evidence that they were into the minefield plucked at his breath now, and he heard his heartbeat loud in his ears, punctuated by the first rifle shots from the side of the trawler. He waited, but the mine did not explode. It disappeared in the swell and did not re-emerge. The water had washed into the holes made by the.303 bullets. When it had gone, Gilliatt remembered to replace his cap with the steel helmet that hung across his shoulders. The rest of the sweep deck crew had retired behind him already.

In the distance, there was a fount of white water as a mine exploded, but no thump of shock-wave reached them. Then a second fountain, and a third. The flotilla's sweep wires were cutting the first leg of the prescribed path with an uninterrupted regularity. A fourth fountain, then a mine bobbing perhaps a couple of hundred yards astern of the Bisley, almost immediately sending up its fountain of water like a signal of its release as rifle fire exploded it. A slight tremor ran through the deck plating, and the shock of water thumped against the stern of the minesweeper.

At the end of the first lap of the sweep, Bisley hoisted the signal to take in port sweeps and stream to starboard in readiness for the second leg. It was a quick turn around — the men on Bisley's sweep deck working even more like automata, drilled, oiled, perfect — in the reasonably calm water, with sufficient breeze blowing offshore to take the funnel smoke clear of the look-out's arc of vision. A flow of sightings and detonations continued to reach Bisley until the flotilla was some miles into the second leg — the grey dawn light had strengthened but the low cloud remained, diffusing the weak sunlight so that it rubbed against the eyes like an irritant — but then minutes went by for Gilliatt on the sweep deck without a fountain of white water and without Bisley cutting a single mine.

For over a mile, there was a preternatural stillness that was undisturbed even by the steady beat of the engines. No rifle fire, no detonations. The telephone rang and Gilliatt picked it up.

"Is the sweep running well?" Ashe asked.

"All in order, sir."

"We haven't cut a single mine for more than a mile, Number One. Pilot has marked the area. Damned odd. We'll finish this lap, then run another leg and check as we sweep. I don't like it—"

"Sir?"

"I don't know what I mean, Number One."

"Couldn't it be the minelayers, sir? Or perhaps the mines laid haven't been released from their sinkers?"

"I'd expect that of an enemy minefield laid in a hurry — but not of the Manxman and Co.! Stand by, Number One."

Gilliatt remained puzzled until they had completed the second leg of the sweep. Within minutes of Ashe's gloomy, mystified comments, they began cutting mines again. When they had reached the end of the lap, another quick turn around was followed by the port sweeps being streamed again for the third lap. As the flotilla, trailing as before behind Bisley, moved towards the suspect area where they had cut no mines, Ashe sent a signal by lamp to the rest of the flotilla.

"Watch sweeps closely. Indicate anything unusual and any mines cut from now. Report immediately with three siren blasts."

Gilliatt felt his body tense, as if a net had closed over his skin and was being pulled tighter. Instinctively, he seemed to know the moment when Bisley moved into the empty area, and found himself waiting for the lack of danger, a false and more dangerous safety.

On the bridge the pilot, an RNVR Lieutenant, checked his chart as Ashe sat drinking a cup of cocoa, knowing that his own deliberations were matched by the more inexperienced guesses of the pilot. They were both thinking that they had stumbled across the beginnings of a swept channel across the British minefield running roughly from north by east to south by West.

Then three blasts on a ship's siren, followed by a detonation. Ashe looked up, and the pilot nodded.

"Just over a mile, sir," he said.

Gilliatt watched the first fountain of water, then a mine bob to the surface which had been severed by their own wire. Rifle fire detonated it within another minute, and the fountain of water remained on his retinae, superimposed upon the long minutes of silence and calm sea. The double-image chilled him.

At the end of the third leg of the sweep, Ashe looked up from the bottom of his cup, held still as a chalice in his hands. He had come to a decision which pressed itself urgently upon his attention. He looked across at the pilot.

"Pilot, we'll detach from the flotilla, steam to the suspect area and make a search through it." He paused, as if the next words were too difficult to utter in the same level voice. "We'll check out your theory of another swept channel across our own. It's too important to wait until we've finished sweeping. The rest of the flotilla to continue with the sweep."

He turned to the Chief Yeoman of Signals. Having broached the subject, it was easier to continue. "Ask the First Lieutenant to come to the bridge. Then prepare to take a signal to the Admiralty."

"Sir!" the Chief Yeoman replied, turning to the bridge telephone and passing on Ashe's order to Gilliatt. Then he moved across the bridge to Ashe, signal pad and pencil ready. Ashe rubbed his grey, drawn face, and then spoke slowly and steadily. "Make to Admiralty. Immediate. Repeated to DMS, to C-in-C Western Approaches, and NOIC, Milford. "Intend checking suspect area in minefield, apparently cleared, four miles into area from westward, running North by East to South by West and over one mile in width. Will report immediately search carried out." " He looked up at the Chief Yeoman for the first time. "Take that to Lieutenant Bennett and ask him to code it up and have it transmitted immediately. Confirm when signal has been passed. Then we'll signal Knap Hill, repeated to the whole flotilla." Ashe was speaking like a machine, with a voice that stepped on thin ice beneath which dark, chilly emotions waited for him.

Gilliatt arrived on the bridge, pausing at the top of the ladder as if he had burst upon some solemn ceremony that could not be interrupted. Ashe went on, speaking now to the leading Signalman whose Aldis lamp was already sighted back towards Knap Hill astern of Bisley: "Make to Knap Hill. Assume command of flotilla for next lap. Am acting independently for special purpose. Will contact you at end of next lap with instructions."

The lamp chattered in the silence as Ashe beckoned Gilliatt and the pilot to the starboard forward corner of the bridge. Gilliatt could see the marks of concern like scars on his captain's face but felt he was only looking into a mirror. Possibilities too huge and threatening to voice or contemplate lurked just at the back of the forebrain. Ashe's whisper seemed entirely appropriate.

"I'm worried, Number One. It doesn't make any sense—" He was moving backwards in time, reaching the shore of fact that lay over the horizon of speculation they could both see. "If there was no major error by the minelayers, and all those mines don't have damaged or faulty release-gear, who's responsible for the hole in Winnie's Welcome Mat?" Gilliatt realized he didn't want an answer. "I've told the Admiralty we'll carry out an independent search from north to south in the area Pilot has mapped. We'll steam ahead of the flotilla to the area on the fourth lap and then stream double Oropesa at the same settings—" Ashe raised his hand against an interruption Gilliatt had no intention of making. Rather, he was allowing his captain to express authority, certitude at a moment when he needed such a reassertion of self. "I know we'll be taking a chance of blowing ourselves up on one of our own mines — and with my luck it wouldn't" be a dud — but we have to solve this, Peter." His face darkened. Gilliatt had the impression of an actor reciting carefully rehearsed lines. The emotions were genuine, but they lay as a mask over other, less controllable, feelings. "The Admiralty boffins and DMS will buzz when they get my signal." The last words were a reassertion of wardroom manner, enclosing the self in safe, pre-war attitudes. Jolly good show—

Gilliatt wished he could re-enter reassurance's safe, comfortable room. He nodded, and added merely, "Very good, sir." Ashe studied his face as if for mockery for a moment before he continued.

"You prepare the double sweep, Number One. Pilot, make sure we sail down the middle of the suspected channel."

"Sir." The pilot rubbed his long sallow cheeks as if to smooth out the entrenched lines or rub away the habitual stubble of beard. He appeared about to say something but took his cue instead from Gilliatt's silence. Ashe dismissed them both with a curt nod.

Gilliatt returned to the sweep deck to organize the double sweep, while the pilot returned to his navigation table. Ashe stood morosely, wrapped in a tight net of gloomy prognostications now he was silent again, in the starboard for" ard corner of the bridge until Bisley approached the suspected channel.

"Five minutes, sir," the pilot called from his table.

"Very well, Pilot," Ashe replied in a rusty, unused voice. "I want a course to steer to the northern edge of the suspect area, and then a course to steer down its centre. As he finished, a seaman from the signal cabin came up onto the bridge and seemed immediately unsettled by the suppressed, intent silence. He handed Ashe the Admiralty's decoded reply.

"As soon as check carried out to limits of area required in operation signal report back. If area is clear as believed detach from flotilla and proceed with all despatch to Milford where NOIC will give berthing and movement instructions."

Ashe held the signal in a hand he concentrated upon keeping steady for a long time. Then he dismissed the seaman with a nod. Ashe sat down in his captain's bridge chair delicately, as if his bones were made of glass. To Lieutenant Cobner, the pilot, he looked extremely old. Cobner dismissed his own surmises, shutting out everything except the chart under its table-light, the course he was plotting.

Eventually, he said to Ashe, "Steer 040, approximately two miles, sir, then turn to 198 degrees."

"Aye, aye, Pilot."

Cobner waited as he would have on some important, personal decision until Ashe gave the order to the officer of the watch, a young sub-lieutenant standing behind the yeoman. Cobner visibly relaxed.

Bisley reverberated to increased speed and to running across the swell as she changed course. Ashe said again to the officer of the watch: "Warn the Chief Buffer that I want no one below decks unless absolutely necesssey while we do the search sweep. Check all watertight doors and bulkheads. Warn the Engineering Officer, and every member of ship's company must be wearing lifebelts— you, too, sub!" The little personal joke fell heavily, inappropriately into the deep pool of the bridge's atmosphere. The sub-lieutenant proceeded to transmit Ashe's orders.

"Ready to turn now and point new course, sir," Cobner said.

Ashe raised himself from his chair and took over at the compass platform. Clearing his throat, he began barking his orders down the voice pipe to the wheelhouse where the Coxswain was now closed up and at the wheel. The Coxswain CPO had the gift of touch-steering, and Ashe always used him for anything other than routine. But the knowledge that CPO Fenwick was in the wheelhouse gave him no confidence now. Every perspective of sense or thought rendered old routines, old comforts, illusory.

"Starboard 15!"

"15 of starboard wheel on, sir." Bisley leaned to port as she swung round to starboard.

"Midships."

"Midships, sir!"

"Steer 198, Cox" n." Then he said to the yeoman: "Tell the First Lieutenant to stream sweeps." The yeoman picked up the bridge telephone and transmitted Ashe's message to Gilliatt on the sweep deck with his crew.

Gilliatt watched the wake of their change of course dissipate behind them, and the smoke from the rest of the flotilla — small grey shapes sailing a different course — dragged into stiff, unreal shapes by the offshore breeze, and shut out reflection. There was a peculiar pointlessness in opening perspectives which were better shut off by a concentration on the smaller futilities of routine.

"Stream sweeps, port first!" Both sweeps were in the water smoothly and swiftly, veering out onto their quarters. When the kite had been shackled to each sweep wire, they, too, disappeared into the green water. The small grey toys of the flotilla had now passed astern of the Bisley. Distant explosions, fountains of water, the pattering of gunfire. Normality. "Sweeps running smoothly," he said into the telephone. He could feel the ship straining against the drag of the double sweep, feel the reverberation as Ashe increased revolutions.

Gilliatt moved to the starboard guard-rail, watching the two floats, his eyes flickering between them like those of a tennis spectator. His hands gripped the rail unnoticed. He knew they must now be clear of their own swept area. No mines rolled with the swell, bobbing up to the surface. A watery sunlight which hurt the eyes less than the cloud-cover had done gleamed weakly off the water. He saw Knap Hill, now leading the flotilla, flash a signal to them.

"God be with you."

And Fraser's Scottish Presbyterianism no longer seemed overdone or antiquated but moving instead — and forbidding. He wondered whether Ashe would return his habitual signal: "The Devil looks after his own." He didn't think so. Gilliatt turned his attention to the bridge, and smiled as he read the reply. Ashe must have recovered something of his confidence.

"May the Lord lighten our darkness and unfold His mystery."

When he had sent his reply, Ashe returned to his chair, and sat unmoving, minute after minute, making the bridge an electric, charged, cramped space where the pilot, the yeoman and the officer of the watch fidgeted, coughed, shuffled to dispel the mood he created. The humorous reply to Knap Hill's captain, Fraser, seemed to have drained some last reserve of pretence or resolution from Ashe. The pilot, as he tracked their progress through what should have been a minefield, willed Ashe to look at the chart. It was a channel, it was—

Ashe continued to sit, carved or petrified by his own knowledge. The silence beyond the bridge deafened them.

They all knew it, Cobner thought, there was no need to go on. Gilliatt down on the sweep deck would know it, the sea empty of cut mines, the coxswain would know it, subby knew, the yeoman — the men on deck, shuffled for" ard of the sweep deck like a transported herd. Come on, man, come on—

And then Ashe was at his shoulder, staring at the chart. Cobner's finger rested on their position. Ashe breathed in deeply, once, then crossed to the voice pipe.

"Cox" n, reduce revolutions." Then, galvanized, he was at the bridge telephone. "Number One, stand by to take in sweeps — in sweeps!" He paused, then: "Report to my cabin on completion, Number One." He turned to Cobner, eager now to escape the bridge, as if a stranger himself to the atmosphere he had created and not yet dispelled. "Take over, Pilot. Steam north again on 020 until we're heading east again, inform me and we can relax ship's company a little." The brief smile that he tried to fit to his mouth when he had finished speaking did not seem viable and he abandoned it.

As he went below, Ashe could think of nothing else, feeling the realizations engulfing him like a wave of sickness. It was a German-swept channel, running from the edge of the minefield to the coast of Ireland, and it meant only one thing—

Invasion.

The Germans were going to invade Ireland.