He breathed a sigh of relief. Inside his head a hard little voice rasped, ‘It’s not over yet, you know. Now mind how you go.’ He took the strain. On the bridge Dickie stopped altogether and watched anxiously, hands on the wheel. Besides him Sandy Ferguson, his face lined and worried, prepared to move with the skipper. He knew what Lt Smith was going to do and it was tricky, very tricky indeed.
Smith exerted more pressure. The veins stood out at his temples with the strain and sweat glistened like opaque pearls in his eyebrows. The pole trembled. Was it going to slip? No. The trembling stopped abruptly. The point had successfully lodged in some rust-eaten crack on the mine’s surface. He could begin to move it.
Flexing his shoulder muscles, he took full strain, leaning against the pole with as much weight as he dared. It was almost as if he were back at Harrow in one of those long, lazy summers before the war, punting on the river. Slowly the mine began to move.
‘Dickie,’ he called through gritted teeth, ‘take her forwards… dead slow!’
‘Dead slow it is,’ Dickie called back, the usual bantering note vanished from his voice.
Veins bulging at his temples with the effort, face red, Smith, followed by Ferguson with his rifle, began to ease the mine aft as the Swordfish crept forwards, Dickie acutely aware that he must not make a bow wave. That would bring disaster if it swamped the mine.
Yard by yard, the little craft moved forwards. In fact the whole deadly business probably only took minutes, but to a sweating apprehensive Smith it seemed ages. Now his breath was coming in sharp hectic gasps as if he were running a great race. The sweat dripping from his brow threatened to blind him, while his shoulder muscles burned electrically with the strain of moving that ton of metal and high explosive. But he was going to do it. He was!
Suddenly – startlingly – the mine ducked beneath the surface of the water. ‘Watch it sir!’ Ferguson cried in alarm. Just in the nick of time did Smith prevent himself from overbalancing and falling into the sea. What now?
A moment later the mine bobbed to the surface twenty or more feet to their stern.
Chris clapped her hands in sheer delight and cried, ‘Bravo, bravo Pan Leutnant!’
Dickie breathed out hard and said weakly, ‘Oh my sainted aunt, I almost had kittens,’ while CPO Ferguson muttered a crude Glaswegian oath under his breath and waited for permission to fire.
‘Give it another fifty feet or so,’ Smith recovered himself quickly and pointed at the dark shapes of the Polish fishing smacks to their stern. ‘Don’t want those poor devils to go through what we’ve just gone through.’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ Ferguson answered and raised the Lee Enfield. He took his time. He knew he couldn’t afford to miss. He wouldn’t have a second chance. Soon the mine would be out of his range.
‘Stop engines!’ Smith commanded to help him.
‘Stop engines!’ Dickie repeated the order and the Swordfish came to a stop once more.
Now there was not a sound, save the drip-drip of the water in the bilges.
Ferguson took first pressure, his knuckle white on the trigger. He controlled his breathing as he had been taught to do at the Whale Island gunnery school back at the turn of the century. He fired.
There was a tremendous explosion. A huge whirling burst of white water shot into the night sky, followed by a great flash ofred light. Smith felt the blast buffet him in the face like a slap from a flabby wet fist. He blinked rapidly and then Chris was coming towards him, as the boat rocked and heaved, bearing the bottle and a half-filled water glass.
‘Vodka,’ she said and this time he didn’t object. He swallowed it down in one gulp; he needed it.
Four
The Black Baron was smoking moodily in the conning tower of the U-23 when he heard the muted sound of the explosion far away to the west. They were surfaced ten kilometres west of Göteborg. From below the duty watch were taking it in turns to catch some fresh air, while at the same time they charged the electric batteries. They had been just outside Swedish waters for twenty-four hours now, and the Black Baron was beginning to wonder if he had picked the wrong spot to intercept this mysterious Tommy craft and the vanished barges.
From long wartime experience he knew there were two entrances to the Baltic from the North Sea. The one ran through Danish territorial waters to the west between Odense and Slagelse, then past Nakskov and on to the east of the German island of Fehmarn. The other was to the east, down the Swedish coast, but in international waters, until the straits narrowed again between Angelholm and Helsingborg, where the channel ran through Danish territorial waters once again.
He had guessed somehow the mysterious Tommy and the rest would not want to sail through Danish territorial waters too long, especially as they would have to sail close to Fehmarn and German waters before they entered the broad international waters of the Baltic. He had decided to guard the east approaches and wait for them there.
Now it seemed he might have been right all along. Suddenly alert, he tossed his cigar over the side in a bright scarlet arc and ordered, ‘Silent running.’
As one, the men of the duty watch on deck froze. They were all veterans, who adored their disfigured skipper. Together they had been through many a tight scrape in the last six years. They obeyed him without question.
Thus as they froze like waxwork dummies in some dusty, forgotten historical tableau, the Black Baron raised his telescope – his damaged eye was no good for binoculars – and surveyed the sea and the horizon. The sliver of moon still cast its cold spectral light and the sea was calm. Hence vision was good and it did not take him long to pick up the dull glow that momentarily lit up the horizon before it vanished for good.
Next to him Peters broke the heavy silence with a whispered, ‘What do you make of it, skipper?’
The Black Baron hesitated a moment or two before replying. His hideous face tightened. Baron von Kleist was a brave, ruthless man in the best traditions of the German U-boat service, but he was also a cautious one. That is why he had survived the war when most of his ‘year’ at the Imperial U-Boat School were long at the bottom of the sea, feeding the fishes. ‘My guess is,’ he said finally, as he waved for the deck crew to relax and go about their duties, ‘that somebody – or perhaps something – bumped into one of those loose mines from the old wartime minefields. As you know, Number One, there are still hundreds of them floating about. Those mutinous dogs in the minesweepers were not going to risk their worthless lives to sweep them for the Tommies. They had better things to do – like kicking their officers overboard in harbour and the like.’
Peters nodded his understanding and said, ‘But is it them?’
‘Well,’ the Black Baron said, his mind made up, ‘there’s only one way to find out. We’ll go and have a look-see. We shall proceed on the surface. Slow speed and rigged for silent running. As soon as we hear engines, we stop and listen, Klar, Peters?’
‘Klar, Herr Leutnant,’ Peters barked smartly, as if they were still officers and gentlemen and members of his Imperial Majesty’s Navy, instead of renegades and outlaws, doing the dirty work for an illegal Intelligence organisation.
Moments later the U-23, her surface as black as her skipper’s dreadful face, was cleaving through the still dark waters heading due west…
* * *
With her Thorneycroft engines purring softly, hardly audible against the chug-chug of the fishing smacks’ motors, the Swordfish was now beginning to pass the Danish island of Laes. The moon had now vanished, but there were little yellow lights glowing across the water from the island and at periodic intervals the harsh white beam from the little place’s lighthouse flashed across the sea. How nice and snug they were, those unknown Danes, Smith told himself as he stood on the bridge muffled in a thick coat, his collar about his ears. Never a war for nearly half a century, living in a country which had never known any shortages, and a man could eat a dozen eggs and half a dozen rashers of prime bacon if he wished to without a worry where his ne
xt food was going to come from.
He forgot about the unknown Danish islanders. Instead he turned his thoughts to Chris, now sound asleep in his bunk below. He fancied himself half in love with her already. The girl was not only beautiful, but she had pluck and the kind of sense of humour you rarely found in women. But she was devoted so intensely to her country. Poland was with her twenty-four hours a day. Could a woman like that, so intensely patriotic, settle down to the humdrum existence of a junior naval officer’s wife, waiting in some grim, dreary northern port, waiting for her nomadic husband to come – with or without the bacon?
What was it that Dickie Bird was fond of saying in this respect? ‘We’re not the marrying kind, old chap. Dash it all, we’re just meat-and-drink for rapacious harlots and these new-fangled flappers letting their hair down – and other things too, what?’ and here he would always give a knowing wink and a nudge. ‘Rapacious harlots and flappers.’ The words echoed and re-echoed through Smith’s brain, as the little convoy plodded on at a wearisome five knots an hour.
Smith sighed. Suddenly he felt a little depressed, his usual high spirits vanished. He told himself that it was not unusual. At three in the morning most men’s spirits were at a low ebb. It was a fact of life. All the same he did feel a little let down.
But abruptly his mood disappeared. There was someone else out there! A new sound had broken into the well-known chug-chug of the Polish fishing boats and the soft hum of theThorneycrofts. And it was not the sound of some Danish fishing boat. No, this was the thick, throaty hum of diesels, firm and purposeful. There was another naval craft out there. Was it a Dane? Perhaps some Danish coastal protection vessel?
He knew almost at once that couldn’t be it. What coastal protection vessel skipper in his right mind would be out at this time of the night? He’d be safely tucked away in a snug bunk ashore. There was no smuggling into Denmark. The country was rich and prosperous. It had everything. Admittedly the price of alcohol was high as it was in every Scandinavian country, for the Northerners were notorious on account of their addiction to alcohol. But that kind of smuggling would be much further south via the German frontier with Denmark.
He strained his eyes and peered into the velvet night. At the same time he turned his head into the wind, trying to catch the direction from which the sound was coming. But the craft, whatever it was, stubbornly refused to make its appearance. He wondered whether he should rouse Kerrigan, who acted as his ‘flags’, or signaller on this voyage, and tell him to signal SOS to the fishing smacks’ skippers. But just as he decided to do so, the sound stopped. He strained hard. But it had definitely stopped. Now there was only that of the sea and the familiar ones of the craft behind him.
He started to relax. Could it have been a figment of his imagination? He knew nature played tricks on lonely men serving the graveyard watch at sea. Yet he was damned sure he had heard the engines of some powerful naval vessel or other! He stared a little perplexed at the Danish island. Had it come from over there in the little harbour? Had some engineer turned on his engines and then stopped them again?
But there was no sign of navigation lights over there. No twinkling red and green lights of a vessel about to move. Nothing. All the lights he could see came from houses, not from ships. With dramatic suddenness the harbour lighthouse flashed its roaming beam to sea, swinging round a 180-degree arc, as was customary. And there it was. There was no mistaking that long lean sinister shape on the surface of the sea. He glimpsed it just momentarily, but it was enough. He had seen enough of the swine during the last show. ‘Christ!’ he yelled aloud, taken completely by surprise, ‘it’s a U-boat!’ Next moment he was crying at the top of his voice, ‘Kerrigan, show a leg, will you? For God’s sake get that SOS signal across to the Poles…’
* * *
Dawn came reluctantly, cold, grey and rainy. Visibility had dropped dramatically and the wind was freshening. A worried Smith guessed there’d be a gale before the day was out. Now they were running close to Danish coastal waters though the land itself had vanished into the wet greyness.
Bird had just relieved him and had once again asked, ‘Are you sure, Smithie? It could be all that deuced vodka muck you were knocking back all day yesterday. You know you’re not much of an imbiber.’
Smith had replied grimly. ‘I saw it all right, Dickie. It was a Hun sub.’
‘But the Hun navy surrendered eons ago,’ Dickie had objected. ‘What would a lone Hun U-boat be doing patrolling these waters, eh? Tell me that, old bean.’
It was an overwhelming question for which Smith had no answer. Now as he sat in the crowded little wardroom, hardly bigger than the ‘smallest room in the house’, nursing the splendid cup of Camp coffee Chris had brought him, he pondered the question anew. All he could guess was that if this strange U-boat was still working for the Hun military – and he thought that was the most likely possibility – it wouldn’t do anything until his little convoy was out of national waters, in this case, Danish.
Still holding the mug of coffee, he crossed over to the charts neatly furled in the rack at the side of the wardroom table. In the tight confines of the Swordfish, every inch of space had to be utilised, and picking out the map for the western end of the Baltic, he stared at it, estimating the Swordfish’s position at the moment.
They were just off Odense, some two nautical miles off shore, therefore inside Danish territorial waters. His eyes followed the coast as far as Rødby on the Danish island of Lolland. There he would be forced into the narrows between Danish territory and the German island of Fehmarn, if he decided to follow the western route into the Baltic.
He sucked his teeth for a moment and pondered the matter. As long as he sailed within Danish territorial waters, the Swordfish and the convoy would be safe.The new Weimar Republic wanted no trouble due to incidents at sea in Danish waters with the Danes. They had internal troubles enough, first the Army revolting, then the communists down in Bavaria and setting up their own republic. But as soon as the convoy reached the straits between Fehmarn and Lolland, things could be different. It would be so easy for the Huns to argue after any ‘incident’ that there had been a mistake, or that the convoy had strayed into German territorial waters and they had had every reason to deal with a mysterious armed vessel – which had no right to be there in the first place.
He stared hard at the chart and wondered what he should do. For the time he was safe naturally. But what would happen in those damned straits off Fehmarn? Had the Huns other vessels available just like the mysterious sub he had glimpsed off the Danish island? What about aircraft? The Huns were forbidden to have military aircraft just as they were forbidden submarines. But the clauses of the Versailles Treaty forbidding these weapons didn’t seem to be binding for the new government in Weimar.
Chris came into the wardroom and found him staring, deep in thought, at the chart. ‘Trouble?’ she asked quietly.
‘Possibly,’ he said, forcing a smile. He didn’t want to worry her unduly. He explained what he thought the position was and she considered for a moment before saying, ‘We Poles are a fatalistic race. We accept that trouble may occur, but it will always be another day, or so we think. So for a day or so we can sail along the Danish coast without trouble, as you see it. Let us do that. We shall worry about what may happen in the stretch – what do you call it?’
‘Straits,’ he volunteered.
‘Thank you, straits between that Danish place and the German island of Fehmarn when we come to it.’
Smith smiled a little wearily. ‘’Spect you’re right,’ he agreed. ‘What was it we used to say during the last show – smile a lot and make a pretty corpse?’
Instinctively she crossed to him, cupped his chin in her hand and kissed him firmly on the lips. ‘Don’t say things like that. I want you to remain a pretty living thing, not a corpse.’
Smith blushed…
* * *
Three miles away the Black Baron frowned. The little convoy had changed direction
, he had noted ten minutes before. They were now sailing just within Danish territorial waters, perhaps some two and a half miles off the coast. It was obvious now that they were going to continue to do so until they reached Lolland.
Opposite him in the little control room, heavy with the stink of diesel oil, stale male sweat and the constant farting due to the breakfast of thick green pea soup with sausage, Peters cleared his throat. He said, ‘What do you think, skipper?’
‘I think we shall have to leave them for the time being. We can’t risk having any trouble with the damned Danes. We need the milk and butter people,’ he added contemptuously. ‘We can’t risk having them stop the supplies of food to the kids back in the Fatherland.’
Peters nodded his agreement. He knew, too, the Tommies had lifted their wartime blockade of Germany, but that food was still desperately short. Dutch and Danish farmers were making fortunes selling their wares to the Fatherland. They couldn’t jeopardise that… ‘Where shall we tackle them then, skipper?’
The Black Baron turned his hideous face towards his second-in-command, and even after all these months Peters couldn’t check his slight shudder at the horrible sight. He had read somewhere recently that a famous German sculptor was crafting tinplate facial masks to hide the tortured features of those mutilated by the war and who were being kept hidden from the general public in special homes. Dare he suggest something like that for the skipper, he wondered? He opened his mouth to mention the masks, then decided against it. The Black Baron had the pride of his caste. They never hid their failings.
‘I have thought about that,’ the Black Baron answered at last. ‘If they are aware that we exist, which I doubt, we have covered our tracks with our usual diligence, I think I may say.’
The Baltic Run Page 11