The captain's eyes seemed suddenly alert, demanding as those of an interrogator.
"Yes? How far did you proceed — what course?"
"An hour. The swept channel is at almost ninety degrees to the channel we were sweeping. I — did not think it necessary to proceed to the southern edge of the minefield to ascertain the full extent of the sweep that had been carried out—" Ashe was picking his way through a booby-trapped area of emotive words, smoothing all evocation from his voice.
"Go on." The captain was childishly impatient for the climax of the story.
"The channel is almost a mile wide, and we estimate it runs from the southern edge of the minefield—" he began to pull a chart from his inside breast-pocket, unfolding it so that it crackled in the warm, temporary room. Gilliatt listened to a typewriter in one of the other partitioned cells of the drawing-room, and a saucer rattled in a cup. Ashe spread the chart, the minefield on it, a peppering of little red crosses. The captain leaned forward, touched it almost reverentially. Then Gilliatt saw it was nervousness like their own that made him hesitant.
Ashe continued, clearing his throat, "Here it is — it runs north by east to south by west, from the coast at a point just east of Cork to the dog-leg here which marks the edge of the minefield—" Ashe's finger traced carefully, as if across the surface of a still-wet print. His finger moved down, and as if to stop him, the captain spoke.
"North to south — Ireland to France. Very well, gentlemen—" He looked at the chart again, at the hard black lines that denoted the discovered channel through Winston's Welcome Mat that Ashe had marked — a dotted line indicated the remaining area that Bisley had not searched. When Gilliatt studied his face, he saw that it was clenched tight around some indigestible fact or emotion. There was white along the line of the jaw, the lips were thinned and bloodless, the fine lines around the eyes had become creases. "Gentlemen — the sooner all three of us get this to London, the better."
As the D-class cruiser signalled each of the three merchantmen in turn to alter course on another leg of their zig-zag route, the noise of the U-boat spotter — a seaplane — overhead faded into the murk of the coming dusk and the rain-squall. It should have stayed with the convoy for another two hours, to the limit of its range, but the weather was already closing in on its Gander base, and unless it returned immediately it would be unable to land either at the airfield or on the lake. And it did not possess sufficient reserves of fuel to outfly the weather.
The noise of its engines disappeared behind the gale-force wind which flung great sheets of green-white spray against the superstructures of the four ships. They would be alone now, without escort or spotter planes, for fifteen hundred miles of the North Atlantic. Perversely, the bad weather was almost welcome. No U-boat could operate at periscope or torpedo depth in the troughs and peaks of the sea that was now running.
The three merchantmen altered course in turn, shepherded by the cruiser. Each man aboard assumed that, whatever his dreams demanded or envisaged, they were headed for the perilous North Channel and the Clyde or the Mersey, if they survived the wolfpacks that without doubt waited for them. Except the cruiser's captain and first officer, who had opened their sealed orders after they rendezvoused with the convoy, and knew that a passage was being swept for them at that moment through the St George's Channel minefield.
Those two officers also knew the nature of the special cargo carried on board the cruiser itself, more vital in its way than the grain and oil and machine-parts on board the merchantmen, more vital even than the experimental route of this special fast convoy.
Goessler and Lobke were shopping in Oxford Street, — the younger man with an almost child-like pleasure, sampling boutiques and department stores and record shops with the hurried inquisitiveness of a garden bird seeking food in winter. Goessler's attitude was parental, a mock reserve covering his own enjoyment. After a couple of hours, they abandoned the thudding rock music of the small boutiques for the encompassing, air-conditioned expanse of Marks & Spencer near Marble Arch. For Lobke, Oxford Street had already almost replaced the Kurfurstendamm as a place of dreams.
They had travelled to London as accredited personnel of the East German embassy the previous afternoon, registering at a modest but comfortable hotel in Bayswater. From their floor, there was a distant view of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
While they shopped with the habitual comprehensiveness of East European diplomats visiting the West, Goessler answered Lobke's questions concerning the operation that Goessler had termed Juwelier — jeweller. McBride was the merchant who would handle the gemstones of Smaragdenhalskette. Their deliberately casual and interrupted conversation provoked no interest in the shoppers around them.
Piling two Shetland pullovers onto the heap of shirts he carried in the crook of one arm, Lobke said, "Herr Goessler, I don't understand something—"
"Yes, Rudi?" Goessler replied pleasantly, the greater part of his attention taken up by a cellophane-wrapped pile of cardigans through which he was searching for his size. "What would that be?" He seemed to reject the fawn-coloured sample in his size, and began rooting under the piles again for another colour. When he did not find his size in navy-blue, he clucked his tongue against his teeth.
"Why the Wehrmacht ever attempted to invade Ireland in November?"
Goessler smiled. He had moved on to the sweaters, and held up one with a vivid green lightning-flash down its middle. He checked the size, nodded.
"Pride, more than anything else. The Pact with the Bolsheviks, the cancellation of Seelowe — an army of occupation sitting on the coast of France, doing nothing." He tucked the sweater under one arm, moving on to the underwear counter with a surprising eagerness. Lobke trailed after him, the racks of suits irritating the corner of his eye, making him impatient. He returned to his questions as to an anodyne against helpless covetousness. For a moment, he understood shoplifting.
"That's all, Herr Goessler?"
"Inertia — yes. The Wehrmacht had rolled over everyone except England — and that prize had been taken away because Goering could not subdue the RAF. They decided to enter through the back door. Sit in Ireland until the spring, threatening the mainland. A sort of second front which would also have the effect of dissuading the Americans from sending more convoys, increasing their aid to Britain—"
A woman with rinsed hair arranged to frame her narrow face looked up at the sound of Goessler's German, and Lobke wandered off towards the suits while Goessler answered her questions concerning the whereabouts of men's overcoats — a friend had bought a long leather trench-coat on her last visit for less than three hundred and fifty marks, were there any left? Goessler seemed amused by the conversation.
When he joined Lobke, the young man was already being instructed by a sales assistant not to leave his parcels unattended on the floor while he tried on a suit jacket. Goessler laughed, explained that he would stand by the heap of plastic bags. Lobke paraded in front of a full-length mirror, shy of Goessler's proprietorial smile.
"It was rather a good scheme—" Goessler explained, half to himself.
"Why did the Nazis try to hide all trace of it?" Lobke asked, shuffling through a rack of trousers to find his size.
"Another failure was not to be admitted, even remembered, Rudi — besides which, I think it was hidden deep in case it was to be used again in "41, or maybe even as late as "42."
"But it wasn't?"