‘I’m glad for you,’ a little voice inside von Kleist’s head said ironically. Aloud he said, ‘What kind of trouble, sir?’
The naval surgeon was no longer so bluff. He said a little hesitantly. ‘Perhaps you’d better look for yourself.’ He turned to one of the nurses, a pretty one, ‘Schwester Klara, please give Leutnant von Kleist a looking glass if you can find one.’
Flustered, the pretty nurse hurried away to the end of the long empty ward, her heels clicking on the polished wooden floor, while von Kleist waited with a growing sense of apprehension.
A minute or so later she came back and handed him a small round glass, her pretty white face suddenly full of fear and stricken. ‘Here you are, Herr Leutnant,’ she said passing him the looking glass hurriedly, as if its handle had suddenly become red-hot.
He took it and looked. The right side of his face was as he remembered it, glacially handsome in that hard manner of the von Kleists. But its left side was a monstrosity. It was black like charred timber, all cracked and fissured and the eye was set in it in a kind of scarlet suppurating pit. The left side of his face was a nightmare. With it, he knew with the hundred per cent certainty of a vision, he could never enter polite society again. It was a face that would frighten people. No woman would look at him, not even paid whores. He had become a leper, an outcast from society, doomed to being a pariah till the end of his days, if he didn’t take his own life before then.
‘You see after you were knocked out, the Tommy dropped a fire bomb right down the conning tower, or perhaps it was intended as some kind of flare…’ the naval surgeon talked rapidly, as if he were afraid that in any kind of a pause the man in the bed would break down.
Von Kleist no longer listened. Already a cold ring had begun to circle his heart, cutting out the shock and horror. There was a sudden burning hatred too: a hatred for the nation which had done this to him, had condemned him to this living death. Inside him a harsh little voice had declared, ‘They shall pay for this… tenfold… oh, yes they will pay…’
Thus his covert career had commenced. While the rest of the Imperial Navy had sailed tamely to Scotland to surrender, he had fled with the U-23 to a remote cove in Sweden carrying with him the aces of the Richthofen Squadron under their last commander Captain Goering, who had also sworn never to surrender. Then he had torpedoed a British trooper carrying men to join the British intervention force at Murmansk in Russia. The Reds had been blamed for that. Financed by the secret, and illegal, Naval Intelligence Department he had carried out a dozen highly sensitive missions for Kapitanleutnant von Horn in the Baltic over this last year or so. Clad in glistening black leather, his martyred face tucked deep into the high upturned collar, he would be glimpsed in some discreet little harbour town in Sweden, Germany, Finland, Denmark, and those in the know would lower their voices and whisper discreetly to their neighbour, ‘That’s the Black Baron. Watch him, he’s dangerous…’
Now as the albino with the face of a sadist told him what von Horn had said, the Black Baron nodded his head thoughtfully. They sat together in the furthest corner of a seaman’s Gasthaus just off the waterfront. The place smelt of cheap cigars, stale beer and fish. Not that the Black Baron noticed the smell; after years in the stink of submarines, he never noticed them any more. His attention was concentrated solely on what the petty officer had to say.
The portly landlord in his felt slippers placed the two steaming tea punches in front of them with, ‘Wohl’ bekommst, meine Herren.’ The Black Baron waited until he had shuffled away again before asking, ‘So there is a connection between this Tommy light motor craft and the missing barges?’
‘Jawohl, Herr Baron. Kapitanleutnant von Horn is absolutely sure of it.’
The Black Baron took a thoughtful sip of the red-hot mixture of black tea and rum, while the albino tried to keep his eyes off that horrible face. ‘So,’ the Black Baron broke his silence, while in the corner the four fishermen playing skat started slamming their cards on the table, as was the custom, making their glasses of rum tremble. The Black Baron flashed them a look and they fell silent. ‘So, as I was saying,’ he started again, ‘the Tommy is somewhere in the North Sea, as are these barges with the stolen weapons.’
The albino nodded.
‘The question is, if they are linked, where are they heading?’ The Black Baron answered his own question. ‘Obviously not back to that accursed country – England. What would they do with our weapons? Holland? Those fat Dutch cheeseheads have not fought a war for a hundred years. They wouldn’t know one end of a gun from the other. Russia? I don’t think so. The Tommies have just finished fighting the Reds. So, where else is there?’
The albino remained silent and the Black Baron answered his own question once more. ‘It is somewhere in the Baltic. The whole of the Eastern Baltic is in an uproar – Finland, the Baltic states, Poland. A terrible mess. Everyone grabbing for each other’s territory and using force to do so. Yes, I am certain, it is somewhere in the Baltic.’
‘Jawohl, Herr Baron,’ the albino said dutifully. ‘So what am I to tell Herr Kapitanleutnant von Horn, sir?’
‘Tell him we sail for the Baltic on the tide tonight, Obermaat. And tell him, too,’ suddenly there was iron in the Black Baron’s voice. He stared hard at the albino with that dreadful face, which had given him his nickname throughout the Ostsee2.
‘Once in the Baltic, that particular Tommy will never get out again…’
Three
Chris, as they were all calling her, for she had no aristocratic pretensions at all in spite of her title, pulled another surprise out of the haversack with which she had come aboard the Swordfish, to the accompaniment of some muttering from the little crew. It was a very large bottle of clear liquid without any label on it.
‘Vodka,’ she announced. ‘Best Polish vodka, brewed on my father’s estate.’
Smith took his eyes off the little fleet of fishing smacks, now puffing and huffing in great clouds of black smoke to join up with the Swordfish at her anchorage. ‘What’s the firewater for?’ he asked, looking at her.
‘To drink, of course,’ she answered and Dickie Bird chortled.
‘Touché, old thing. She got you there.’
‘You see,’ she said, ‘in Poland, we always welcome people with bread and salt and vodka. Those Polish skippers won’t expect bread and salt from you, Smith, but they certainly will expect vodka.’
‘But it’s only nine o’clock in the morning,’ Smith objected.
‘That means nothing in Poland,’ she declared happily, giving him that beautiful smile of hers. ‘We drink all the time.’
‘Oh, my sainted aunt,’ Dickie said. ‘Bit much when you’re steering, what.’
‘Our people are used to it. We don’t get drunk more than once a week. It is not,’ she sought for the word, ‘er, cultured to do so.’
‘Standing by for visitors, sir,’ Chief Petty Officer ‘Sandy’ Ferguson cried from the bows. ‘I dinna want yon foreigners scratching ma paintwork. Ye ken, sir, them foreigners dinna have no sense.’
Smith smiled and said, ‘All right, Chiefie, wheel ’em aboard.’
Five minutes later, the ten Polish skippers, all small, very broad men with high Slavic cheekbones and incomprehensible names, were lined up on the deck of the Swordfish, glasses of vodka held in their horny hands, a look of anticipation in their dark eyes.
Smith held up his own glass uncertainly and cried, as Chris had taught him to, ‘Nastrovya, Pan!’ and took a deep gulp of the fiery liquid, which started him off coughing and spluttering at once. The fishing-smack skippers drained their glasses without blinking an eyelid.
‘By jove,’ Dickie exclaimed in admiration, ‘they can’t half knock it back! And that vodka stuff’s just like paint remover.’
Smith nodded his whole-hearted agreement, but he could not speak; he was still fighting to get his breath back.
‘Now Commander Smith,’ Chris said brightly. ‘Will you tell them now what you want the
m to do?’
‘Commander?’ Smith queried, getting his breath back at last.
‘Yes,’ she said brightly. ‘I told them you were a commander. All Poles respect titles and ranks, so I thought they’d be more impressed if you were of higher rank.’
At the bow CPO Ferguson shook his ginger head. In twenty years in the Royal Navy, he had never heard anything like it. That came from letting women aboard ship.
‘All right, tell them this is what Commander Smith wants them to do. First of all, ask them which is the slowest of their ships and what is its speed.’
Swiftly she translated his words into Polish and one of the fishing skippers, a broad-set man, who wore his battered cap set at the back of his long blond hair, which to Smith’s surprise he saw now was encased in a hair net of the kind worn by elderly spinsters when they went to bed back in England, answered and held up five fingers.
‘Five knots, that is the best he can do,’ Chris said.
‘Right, then that is the speed all the fishing smacks will sail at. Tell them that. Because we’re going to sail in convoy.’
‘Convoy’ they seemed to understand; perhaps it was the same word in Polish for they all nodded their agreement even before she had translated Smith’s words.
Swiftly Smith explained that the smacks would sail in columns of fives with some one hundred metres between each column and some fifty between each ship in the column. But all had to be in sight of each other. None of the fishing smacks possessed a radio so that these distances had to be strictly kept, in order that they could communicate with each other by loudhailer in case of an emergency.
Smith eyed his listeners and came to the conclusion that they were a tough, experienced old bunch and that he could rely upon them. ‘For most of the trip,’ he continued, ‘I shall take the lead, keeping about half a mile in front of the convoy but always within seeing distance.’
Chris translated his words and most of the skippers nodded their heads and murmured, ‘Tak, tak,’ as if they liked the idea of being guarded closely by the little warship.
‘Tell them, I assume they can’t read signals or the Aldis lamp.’
‘Aldis lamp?’ she queried and he pointed to the lamp mounted next to the bridge, which could send Morse with the shutter fixed over the light.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘So you can signal with that light, but they won’t be able tothis Morse code of yours.’
‘No, I don’t expect they can, but everyone who goes to sea these days know one Morse signal.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The international Morse signal for help. SOS.’
‘Save our souls,’ Dickie interpreted for her. ‘Well, I think it means that, doesn’t it, Smithie?’
Smith ignored the interruption. He wanted to get under way and make the most of the daylight. In these regions and at this time of year, daylight vanished by three in the afternoon. ‘It goes like this, three dots, three dashes and then three dots again.’ He tapped the rail with his fingertip so that she could hear. ‘Now in time of danger I shall signal the SOS to them by means of the Aldis lamp and they are immediately to close on me as fast as they can. I’ll give them what protection I can. But let’s hope there’ll be no need for that.’
Hurriedly she explained the signal, and Smith could see by the looks on their broad Slavic faces that they knew the SOS signal. ‘Is there anything else?’ she asked when he was finished.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Then you must give them another vodka, Commander.’
Dickie grinned and Smith said in mock irritation – for he had already grown to like this tall lithe girl with her quirky sense of humour – ‘Oh, I say, do soft-pedal that “commander” bit, will you?’ He took up the big bottle, filled up the skippers’ glasses and one for himself – reluctantly – repeated the Polish toast, adding, ‘And good luck to you all,’ and downed the vodka, closing his eyes as he did so.
The stuff hit him an almost physical blow in the stomach. He started coughing and spluttering again. Thus it was that he couldn’t speak in protest, when one after another, the skippers stepped forwards solemnly, clicked their heels together – and kissed his hand!
‘Another Polish custom,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Poles are always kissing people’s hands.’
At the bow, CPO Ferguson’s mouth dropped open stupidly and in a strangled voice, he choked, ‘Did ye see anything like it in yer born days? Them foreigners just went and kissed the captain’s hand!’
* * *
By four that same day a huge silver crescent moon hung over the entrance to the Baltic, casting a thin spectral light over the still water. Now the wind had almost died away and the Swordfish ploughed the dark velvet swell softly. Behind them the fishing smacks, some of them now with their sails lowered, chugged on stolidly.
Smith shivered a little and next to him Dickie Bird asked softly, ‘Penny for them, Smithie.’
‘I was just thinking. During the last show these used to be the most heavily mined waters in the world. It was illegal of course to sow them in international waters, but the Danes and Swedes over there,’ he pointed in the general direction of Göteborg, ‘just had to put up with it. Besides both those neutral states were making a packet out of the Huns.’
Dickie said quickly, ‘But they’ll be all removed by now, Smithie. I mean the Huns are running their own ships through this neck of the woods, too, you know.’
‘I don’t know so much, Dickie. Mines get loose, you know the tide, storms and the like. Why, the time I was in Withernsea—’
‘Have a heart, old chap. Don’t mention that place.’
‘Well, in the time I was there, there were at least a dozen rogue mines washed up along the beach and the same thing is probably true of this stretch of water.’
Dickie Bird was undismayed. ‘You’re seeing ghosts, old bean,’ he responded. ‘Besides, these craft are built to skim across a minefield. You know that.’
‘Yes. A properly organised one with the mines anchored below the surface, but not over floating mines – on the surface.’
‘I say, Smithie, you are a bit of a moaner-groaner today.’
‘I’m not worried for myself, Dickie. It’s those Poles. Their people are waiting for the weapons so that they can stop the Hun from carving up their poor country yet again. It’s a big responsibility.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Chris’s voice broke into the conversation. She was trying to balance two steaming mugs on a little tray. ‘You’re just doing your duty just as we will do. If we die in the cause,’ she shrugged eloquently and nearly upset the tray, ‘well, we Poles have always died for hopeless causes. Now have your cocoa, gentlemen. Ginger tells me you always have your cocoa about now. Oh, and there’s a good drop of vodka in it to make it extra warm.’
Dickie and Smith looked at each other and burst out laughing.
She looked from one to the other in some bewilderment. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Vodka,’ Dickie chortled. ‘Does every blessed thing run on vodka in your country?’
‘Yes, and I’ve got another bottle in my haversack.’
‘Oh tickety-boo,’ Dickie said and raised his mug in toast. ‘We who are about to die salute you.’ He took a deep swig and shuddered violently. ‘God bless us and save us,’ he croaked. ‘I swear the dashed stuff is getting stronger!’
They were chatting about England in the war when Ginger Kerrigan sang out ‘Object, red bearing zero, sir.’ Then he added in what was definitely not the Navy’s way of reporting to an officer, ‘Looks like a great sodding mine to me, sir.’
Smith put down his mug smartly. Next to him Dickie swung round, his affected silly manner vanished in an instant. This was the man who had led the attack flotilla into Zeebrugge in 1918, and had received the DSO for his sterling work in blocking the Belgian harbour, despite seventy-five per cent casualties. ‘He’s right, skipper. Look!’ He stretched out his hand and pointed.
Smith’s heart
sank. Only feet away from the sharp prow of HMS Swordfish, a rusty red metal object bobbed up and down on the swell, its horns protruding on all sides, threatening imminent destruction. They were only moments away from death. ‘Right, take over the controls, Dickie,’ he heard himself say, as if his own voice was coming from very far away.
‘What’s going on?’ Chris asked.
He ignored her. There was no time to waste in explanations. He grabbed the long, brass-pronged boat-hook which was attached to the superstructure, and shouted urgently over his shoulder to CPO Ferguson. ‘Get a rifle and stand by, Petty Officer.’
‘Ay ay, sir,’ Sandy Ferguson said, and doubled away with surprising speed for a middle-aged man.
Now the Swordfish was moving at a snail’s pace, making hardly any bow wave. For that Smith was very grateful. He had dealt with mines before. He wanted nothing to disturb it from its present course. It only took one of those ugly protrusions to scrape the bow of the Swordfish, and one ton of high explosive would go up, taking them with it.
Smith reached out with the boat-hook. Infinitely slowly he brought the brass hook closer and closer to the bobbing, dripping ball of steel. Metal scraped against metal. The brass point slipped and he cursed as the ball of death bobbed and moved away. Already he could feel the cold sweat dripping from his face. But there was nothing for it. He’d just have to try again.
He reached out gingerly with the long pole. Taking the utmost care he aimed at a spot between two of the deadly horns. Next to him Sandy Ferguson, face set and grim, slipped a 303 cartridge into the Lee Enfield. Smith felt metal touch metal once more. He sucked in a deep breath and offered a silent prayer that the pole wouldn’t slip. Time was running out!
Gingerly he began to draw the brass hook between the horns. He was trying to find a firm hold on the mine’s wet, slippery surface. It seemed to take ages, and all the time he knew that the slightest breath of pressure on the horns would explode the whole devilish contraption. Suddenly the tip of the hook grated against rougher metal and didn’t slip. He had found what he sought. Rust!
The Baltic Run Page 10