"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."