"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."