Exton nodded, and stood up. "I'll get straight on with it."
"Take this stuff with you— have it all broken down and properly sifted. Then, start daily reports on McBride, direct to me."
When Exton had gone, Walsingham kept repeating to himself a single phrase, much as if he might have been invoking some god or protective spirit. A dose-run thing. Eventually, he was able to smile, with relief.
The fishing smack owned by Jean Perros and his sons put out from Ste Anne-du-Portzic in a sudden and unexpected snowstorm, and on an incoming tide. McBride and Gilliatt, dressed in blue jerseys and oilskins, assiduously checked the nets and gear with Perros's two sons, Jean-Marie and Claude. The wind-driven sleet half-obscured the shoreline and the straggling suburb that joined Brest to the fishing village. To the east, they could not see — yet — the long, low, grey line that marked the harbour wall of Lanilon where the Germans had constructed their submarine pens.
The engine of the smack was running rough, doctored by the engineer, a cousin of Perros, coughing and chugging with a worrying irregularity had the crew not expected it. McBride's hands became stiff and frozen as he fumblingly worked at checking the heavy, tangled nets, and he concentrated on what he had to do when they reached Lanilon. Occasionally, he looked up as the grey shape of a warship or submarine slid past them in the murk. Perros's boat was unlikely to be challenged, at least not until they neared the breakwater. He welcomed the weather. Gilliatt, seemingly absorbed in his task, appeared oblivious of weather or danger.
The engine cut out, dying throatily like an asthmatic old man. The boat suddenly wallowed in the tide. McBride looked beyond the bow, seeing the grey harbour wall loom in the sleet, then disappear, then re-emerge. They had rounded the Pointe de Portzic, and were drifting towards the western end of the huge harbour. At the western end were the U-boat pens.
The smack drifted under the shadow of the wall, which stretched over them like a great dam. The tide chopped whitely against its base. The minutes limped by. Perros, in the wheelhouse, used the rudder as best he could against the tide and wind, turning the boat portside-on to the harbour wall. The swell caused the boat to lurch repeatedly. Through the squalling snow, McBride could see no other vessels, and no guards on top of the breakwater. The nearest steps down to the water were also obscured.
He touched Gilliatt on the arm, startling him out of a fixed attention to the nets, and nodded. Then he went forward to the wheelhouse. Perros, hands whitened with effort on the wheel, glanced at him.
"The steps are a hundred metres or more ahead of us," he said. Beside him, a nephew scanned the water ceaselessly for other vessels, swinging his glasses in an arc across the wheelhouse screen.
"Can you make it?"
"Maybe. This tide is doing its best to stop me!" He grinned. He'd taken Lampau's death without emotion earlier that morning, almost without comment. He evidently did not blame the two Englishmen, rather seemed to admire them, and to be flattered that they required and needed his assistance. "If we have to start the engine, so be it. It can always cut out again!" McBride nodded, collected his own binoculars from the rear of the cramped, fuggy, fish-stenched wheelhouse — engine-oil smells seeping through the deck planking from the tiny engine-room below. "Good luck," Perros called after him as he went out again.
McBride looked up at the threatening wall, now only yards from the ship's deck. Ahead of them, he could see the steps. He heard the ringing of the wheelhouse telegraph as Perros called for the engine's power. A cough, stutter to life, and the smack pushed forward. The engine throbbed through the deck planking. McBride waited as the steps neared, aware that Gilliatt and the two sons were watching him intently. The engine died suddenly, and McBride wondered whether it had really broken down. Then the boat lurched with the tide against the harbour wall, planks straining, crying out, then the boat began to move away. He jumped, glasses banging against his chest. His hands grappled with the slimy seaweed of the bottom step, water splashed over the tops of his sea-boots, then a wave drenched him up to the waist as he began to slip, his grasp loosened.
He scrabbled for a hold, catching an iron mooring-ring set in the concrete of the lowest exposed step, pushing at the same time with his feet against a seaweed-slippery step beneath the water. Then he pulled himself up, resting only when he was above the reach of the tide.
He sat down. Gilliatt gave him a thumbs-up signal from the stern of the fishing-boat, and Perros's two sons were smiling. The smack had lurched away from the breakwater, wallowing helplessly. Then Claude Perros held up the mooring-rope at the stern, and McBride, suddenly frightened by the insecurity of his perch on the steps and chilled by the wind blowing against the soaking trousers beneath his oilskins, climbed to the top of the harbour wall where the wind heaved at him, trying to throw him back into the water. He waved his arms, and the rope snaked out towards him from the stern of the smack. He caught it, but his frozen fingers could not close on it before its weight dragged it over the edge of the wall. He waited, freezing, while Claude hauled it in, looped it, then threw again. The rope landed like a heavy, arresting hand across McBride's shoulder and he grabbed it tightly, then dragged it to the nearest mooring-ring, looping it through and making it fast.
When they had bow and stern lines fast the smack wallowed only gently in the lee of the wall, the line of old car-tyres down its port side rhythmically rubbing against the concrete of the wall. Perros looked up at him through the screen of the wheelhouse, and waved him to hurry. Engine repairs was the fiction of their need to tie up, but any patrol vessel that found them would tow them away from the sensitive area of the U-boat pens.
McBride crossed to the inner lip of the breakwater, looking into the streaming sleet blowing the length of the massive harbour. The huge breakwater had been built at the end of the century parallel with the beach to enclose a huge harbour, and the port of Lanilon on the western outskirts of Brest was developed. When France had fallen in the middle of 1940, the Germans had almost immediately begun the building of the concrete submarine pens for their U-boats, from which the raiders put out into the North Atlantic to intercept the convoys from neutral America and Canada to a desperate Britain.
McBride could see, away to his left as he stood on the final section of the breakwater wall and almost a couple of hundred yards from the shoreline and the port, the crude concrete bunkers under which huddled, as if against the storm rather than an air raid, the lines of U-boats. He could dimly make out the stern-on shapes of perhaps a dozen vessels undergoing refuelling, refits, repairs, rearming. The tunnels of the separate pens offered themselves to the view through his binoculars like open mouths containing the squat cigars of the U-boats.
He would have to get closer, changing the angle at which he could see them. Numbers alone interested him, designations in white on the conning-towers. The wind howled at him, making him lean into it to preserve his balance, but he felt gratitude towards it now that he was moving along the breakwater towards the guard-post, a grey concrete blockhouse astride the wall where it met the shoreline. Here it scanned the harbour wall and controlled traffic into the pens. If he were spotted—
Slowly, the angle of perception changed until the conning-towers of the two closest submarines began to betray tall white numbers. He could not make them out. The blockhouse was less than a hundred yards away, and he felt naked and exposed, and almost at the mercy of the storm. A gull screamed near his head, then was flung away by the wind, and he shuddered. He had to look as if he was heading for the blockhouse, in case they spotted him, and yet he had to incriminatingly use the glasses. He hunched a shoulder to the shore, raised the glasses, and looked. He could see the white stick of the figure 1, nothing more. The blockhouse was sixty yards ahead of him, and unless they were all blind or dead in there he must be spotted at any moment. He moved on slowly, hunched and leaning against the wind, glasses clenched against his chest in one frozen hand. The figure 1 was accompanied by the half-crescent that might have been the figure 0. His heart jumped almost painfully. A little closer, just a little — if it was a nought, then there had to be a 1 in front as well as behind.