CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Decision
The deception of a summer night dissipated. The swinging, weighted parachutes were being jostled by a cold November wind, and the winter stars were hard and frosty. Each of them was chilled, fixed to the spot, compelled to remain in the middle of the landing ground. The Junkers and Messerschmitts droned away northwards, then banked away to the west, returning a threatening, rustling silence to the wind-soughed darkness.
The first Fallschirmjaeger landed perhaps a couple of hundred yards from them, rolling, getting up and hauling back the "chutes that billowed and tugged them into a trot. Then others were swinging directly above their heads, and a canister thumped into the earth twenty feet away, rolling ominously towards them. It seemed to galvanize McBride. He grabbed Maureen's hand, pulling her off-balance away to their left, towards a straggling copse where already one parachutist had become entangled in a gaunt tree and was not straining to free himself but hanging limply from his harness.
"Come on!" McBride whispered fiercely, and Gilliatt broke into a run behind them.
They were running through a field of ghosts, through strange, marsh-lit spirits that appeared and rolled and moved on every side. McBride caught one parachutist in the back, bowling him over as the man dropped directly in front of him. He stumbled on the treacherous footing of the silk, skipped a few steps, almost catching his feet in the cords, all the time with one arm steering Maureen away from the billowing white mass in their path. For a moment, whiteness seemed all around them and over them, then the bustling wind whipped the "chute into a thin, deflated fold and away from them. The small, leafless copse seemed farther away than before.
Gilliatt cried out, muffled. McBride whirled around, his hurried glimpse of the field behind them one of puffs of white mist rising and boiling from the ground and the last few dandelion clocks floating down to earth. Gilliatt was caught in the folds of a parachute that had descended on him, around him. The parachutist was regaining his feet, becoming quickly aware and dangerous. They postured, still for a half-second, like two gladiators. The net-and-trident man had his opponent enmeshed and at his mercy.
McBride avoided the embrace of the shroud, drawing his pocket knife and opening the blade. The German soldier was punching at the harness lock in the middle of his chest while his other hand brought the MP40 machine-pistol to bear on the wriggling, entangled figure on the ground who was not in uniform under the hard moonlight. Then the German saw McBride approaching, perhaps even the gleam of the knife-blade, and the harness drifted away from his shoulders and chest but caught on the MP40 as it swung towards McBride. McBride elbowed the man off-balance clumsily and as hard as he could, then knelt on top of him. The face was very young, dazed and not yet frightened. He clamped his hand over the man's mouth, and drove up beneath the breastbone with the knife. The body went rigid in its coitus with death, then suddenly limp and sack-like. McBride wiped the blade, then began chopping at the cords of the "chute, freeing Gilliatt.
They stood up together. McBride slipped the strap of the machine-pistol from the dead man's arm and passed the MP40 to Gilliatt.
"Come on."
Figures were moving now, all around them. The last pleasantry of falling parachutes had vanished. Only the heavy, bulky images of troops rising from the ground, of folded silk, of guns and men collecting into units. They were fifty yards from the trees, and there were Germans rolling up their white parachutes between them and cover. The cut "chute billowed and ghosted away with the wind, attracting attention.
"It's no good—" Gilliatt whispered.
"Don't be stupid." McBride took Maureen's hand, and squeezed it. "Come on."
He began running for the trees, and Gilliatt, the MP40 cold and lumpy and uncomforting in his hand, followed them after a moment's hesitation. A cow lumbered into his path, and he ducked alongside it. The animal was disturbed rather than terrified, and was moving aimlessly wherever clear ground presented itself. While it moved towards the trees, Gilliatt moved with it, watching McBride and Maureen and waiting for them to be challenged.
"Halt!" The word was English, almost unaccented. "Who are you?" The cow tried to shake Gilliatt's arm from its flank, its stubby horns waving just in front of his face. McBride and Maureen were just in front of two soldiers, both of whom were unencumbered and whose guns were level on the man and woman.
"I could ask you the same thing!" McBride bellowed in an outrageous brogue, putting his arm around his wife. "This is my farm — what are you doing dropping out of the sky on my dairy herd?" Gilliatt wanted to laugh in admiration of the bluff — which he knew would not work. The cow, startled by the voices, swerved away from the trees, exposing Gilliatt.
"Down!" he yelled, waited for the second which stretched out into danger-induced images of flame and bullets emerging from the two German machine-pistols — he could almost see the bullets in slow-motion, feel his leaden limbs transfixed — then McBride had dragged Maureen below chest-level and he sprayed the two Germans with the MP40 on automatic. They were flicked aside, leaving a gap of ground and the trees where the one dead parachutist hung like an admonition. He ran to McBride even as he heard shouted orders less than fifty yards away for men to spread out, get down, locate the source of the firing—
Panic was on their side now, driving them forward while it dislocated German thinking. Ambush? The Irish army? He hardly paused to haul Maureen to her feet, running on with her arm held in a tight grip into the cover of the trees.
"Where now?" he whispered, his head moving like a clockwork toy, swivelling for sight of danger. There was a crashing through the trees and bushes away to the right, but then a mottled, startled Friesian burst out near them like a pantomime cow, head up, legs comically uncertain. It crashed through bushes and down into a ditch on the other side. McBride pointed.
"Down there."
"Where then?"
"Towards Liss Ard — a mile, no more. Get on with it!" McBride ushered Gilliatt on his way with the MP38 he had picked up from one of the two newly dead. A thin chattering forestalled the humorous remark that would have followed. Wood chips dusted down on them from the lowest branches. "They know where we are — get on, Peter."
Gilliatt pressed through the bushes, and dropped surprised into the deep ditch, rolling over but saving his ankles. Then he waited until Maureen dropped, catching her and holding her on balance. Then he helped her clamber out of the ditch on the other side. Across the fields from them the few lights of Liss Ard seemed to beckon at one moment, then float unsubstantial the next. There was more firing behind them, then the noises of McBride scrabbling to the lip of the ditch.
"I hope to God they've got something better to do than chase us!" he observed, coughing with effort, as they began running across the first field between them and the lights of the hamlet.
Drummond sat opposite the German officer who had come ashore from a small U-boat earlier in the evening, wishing that he would now go and consult with the company commanders who had dropped between Timoleague and Kilbrittain, one of the five designated drop-areas for the Fallschirmjaeger which he had originally selected months before.
Drummond had met Menschler, a staff officer for Sealowe and then for Smaragdenhakkette, on a number of previous occasions, in Berlin before the war and three times when he had visited the Irish Republic as an accredited embassy official. His real purpose had been to consult with Drummond on the proposed invasion beaches and the parachute landing areas for Emerald Necklace. But Drummond had never found himself warming to the stiff, chilly Prussian with the Iron Cross always wrapped in a handkerchief in his civilian pocket. Drummond was almost certain that it was the man he disliked; only occasionally would the sense of the man's German-ness remind him of the stark light that nationality played upon his own treachery.