by Joe Joyce
ECHOWAVE
Joe Joyce
First published in 2015 by
Liberties Press
140 Terenure Road North | Terenure | Dublin 6W
T: +353 (1) 905-6072 | W: libertiespress.com | E: [email protected]
Copyright © Joe Joyce, 2015
The author asserts his moral rights.
ISBN: 978-1-910742-13-6
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Anna Morrison
Internal design by Liberties Press
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All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Prologue
A glint of light was the first he noticed. It was there one moment in the clear blue sky over the Atlantic, and it was gone the next so that he wasn’t sure he had really seen it at all.
He was sitting on the ground against the crude concrete wall of the lookout post on the clifftop at Renvyle peninsula, sipping a mug of tea and feeling the warmth of the sun on his left. Ahead of him was the edge of Inishboffin and then the empty ocean, a deeper blue than the sky. From up here the surface of the ocean looked smooth, brushed here and there by a gentle breeze. Waves broke on the cove beneath the cliff, shuffling the shingle, and the breeze smoothed the long grass back from the edge of the headland.
He kept his eyes on the spot where he thought he had seen the glint of light, and then a speck appeared and he watched it grow bigger. Heading east-north-east, he thought automatically. One of the British patrols, going home to their base in Lough Erne, across the border in the North. Cutting the corner again, he gave a grim smile.
Under a secret agreement between the governments in Dublin and London, they were allowed to fly across the narrow strip of neutral Ireland that divided their base from the ocean. Known as the ‘Donegal corridor’, it saved the RAF patrols a lot of time and extended their range into the Atlantic killing ground where German U-boats and British supply convoys from North America battled daily.
As the speck grew larger, though, it didn’t look like one of their Catalina seaplanes: the shape was wrong.
He pushed himself up against the rough wall, tossed the dregs of his tea to one side, and exchanged the mug for the binoculars on the ledge inside the door of the tiny hut. He found the growing speck and focused the glasses on it. It was coming at an angle that made it difficult to identify, offering neither a head-on nor a clear side view. Definitely not a Catalina or any other seaplane: no floats underneath. He began to mentally tick off all the other possibilities, the British Liberators and the German Condors, all the usual belligerent air traffic that travelled the west coast of Ireland daily.
It wasn’t any of them. It was a shape he wasn’t used to, and he lowered the binoculars and glanced at the chart of fighter and bomber shapes on the wall. It didn’t look like any of them.
He raised the binoculars again and tracked the plane as it approach the hump of Achill Island. Its silver fuselage had no camouflage and no markings that he could see. It occurred to him as it crossed the coast that it was gliding: something about its flight path. He listened as he watched, but he could hear nothing above the wind sighing through the grass and the rhythm of the waves on the shingle.
It’s not going to make wherever it’s heading for, he thought. He checked his watch as it continued inland, dipping from his sight behind the cone of Croagh Patrick. He went back into the hut and began entering the details in his logbook, but stopped after a moment and picked up the telephone. Headquarters would want to know about this immediately.
One
Paul Duggan lay on the bunk, wanting to die. Around him, the small metal box of the cabin vibrated and throbbed and shuddered and lurched as the coaster rose and dropped into the trough of another wave. The air was foetid with diesel fumes and the vomit in the bottom of the metal bucket that he held on the floor with an outstretched hand like a lifeline.
He had nothing left to throw up. He had felt queasy on the crossing from Dublin to Holyhead, but had recovered while they unloaded their cargo of butter and cheese and took on coal for Lisbon. And waited for the navicert which would allow them safe passage through the British blockade. He thought he had got his sea legs as they headed south through the placid Irish Sea, sitting on deck in the summer sunshine, feeling the warm breeze, trying to relax into the motion of the ship. Then they had rounded Carnsore Point and headed west along the south coast of Ireland until the land fell behind beyond Mizen Head. They continued into the full force of the Atlantic until they reached twelve degrees longitude and swung south along the approved course for Portugal, just outside the British ‘sink on sight’ zone in the Bay of Biscay.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the bunk now and was beyond caring. Night was only distinguished from day by the arrival and snores of his cabin-mate, Jenkins, in the top bunk.
The door crashed open and Jenkins came in and held his nose. ‘Get up,’ he ordered. ‘Captain wants everyone on deck.’
Duggan shook his head, the single movement exhausting him.
Jenkins took Duggan’s bucket in one hand and grabbed his arm with the other. He was strong, a lifetime sailor in his mid-forties, twice Duggan’s age. ‘There’s a Jerry bomber taking a look at us.’ He pulled Duggan up like he was lifting a limp doll. ‘Captain wants us ready to abandon ship if the fucker starts shooting.’
I don’t care, Duggan thought as Jenkins pulled him along, bouncing off the narrow walls. Jenkins pushed him up a gangway on to the deck beside the bridge. The sunlight made him blink and the wind made him struggle for breath. He steadied himself against the wall of the bridge, holding on to the lever handle of another door, and looked around.
There was nothing to see, only water. It rose in leisurely swells that blocked out the horizon ahead and passed by in long languorous troughs behind. The plane came into view around the stern, flying low, and angled into a tight bank a couple of hundred yards away. He could see the black Luftwaffe cross on the fuselage and the swastika on the tail fin, and could make out the gondola with the forward gunner, in front of the bomb bay. A Focke-Wulf Condor, he thought, easily recognisable from its gondola.
The plane held its circle and Duggan made his way around the bridge, holding on to anything that would steady him, as it went by the bow, almost hidden behind a wave. The first mate was in front of the bridge, signalling with an Aldis lamp as soon as it came back into sight. Jenkins stood beside him, watching.
‘What’s he signalling?’ Duggan asked, his interest in life reviving.
‘Spelling out “Eire”,’ Jenkins said. ‘In case the fucker can’t see it on the sides of the ship. Or doesn’t know what the tricolour is.’
They watched the Condor continue its circle. It seemed to be climbing but it was hard to tell, as their horizon shifted up and down with the ocean and the ship’s movement. Then the Condor levelled out and flew straight towards them.
H
e’s attacking, Duggan thought, holding his breath, aware of their complete vulnerability. He could see the Perspex front of the gunner’s gondola coming straight for them and knew there was a heavy machine gun there which could cut them in half in one burst.
The first mate sent a stream of curses at it as he signalled furiously with his lamp. Jenkins disappeared around the side of the bridge and instinct made Duggan turn to follow him, but he lost his footing and fell heavily on to the metal deck.
The plane swept over them, briefly blocking out the sun, its four engines thundering off the deck.
Jenkins bunched up the back of Duggan’s heavy sweater and pulled him to his feet. ‘You all right?’ he asked.
Duggan nodded, rubbing his right shoulder where he’d fallen.
‘That’s one big fucker,’ Jenkins said as they watched the plane climb away to the north. ‘Wonder where he’s off to.’
Continuing his patrol, Duggan could have told him. From Bordeaux up the west coast of Ireland to Stavanger in Norway, looking for British convoys. He had read enough daily reports from the lookout stations on the west coast to know the pattern. But he said nothing. No one on board, apart from the captain, knew he was in military intelligence. Or his real name. And the captain didn’t know that, only knew him as Sean McCarthy.
Jenkins and other crewmen had probed for information during the first part of the voyage, when he had still been able to answer. Had he ever been to sea before? What part of the country was he from? Was he going on from Lisbon to America? Would he be coming back with them?
Duggan parried most of questions, telling the truth when it fitted with his cover. He hadn’t been to sea before. He was from the west. No, he wasn’t heading for America. Yes, he’d be coming back with them.
That had surprised Jenkins a little. So, Duggan had concluded, they’ve had one-way passengers before. Probably IRA men on the run, hoping to get to America. Or maybe Germany. Interesting, he’d thought, wondering if his superiors in G2 knew that this was one of the IRA’s escape routes. But that was before he’d become really seasick and lost interest in his job, his mission, the war, remaining alive.
But the Condor scare and the fresh air had begun to revive him. The captain called down to him from the bridge and he pulled himself up the steps by the railing, not trusting his weak legs. The captain held out a mug of tea as Duggan entered and grabbed at a sturdy-looking knob to steady himself. Duggan shook his head.
‘Take it.’ The captain proffered the cup. ‘It’ll help.’
Duggan took the cup and sipped a little tea. The captain offered him a Jacob’s ginger nut biscuit from a tin. Duggan shook his head again and regretted the movement as the ship lurched over the crest of another swell and a wave of dizziness hit him.
‘It’ll help too,’ the captain said, oblivious to the movement. ‘Seriously. I brought them for you.’
Duggan took the biscuit and bit into it.
‘A hot drink and a bit of ginger works wonders,’ the captain said, looking to the helmsman for confirmation. ‘Settles the stomach.’ The helmsman nodded with a knowing grin.
Duggan drank some more tea and felt its heat begin to calm his stomach. He leaned back against the wall, spread his legs to steady himself and dunked the hard biscuit into the tea.
‘Keep your eyes on the horizon,’ the captain added.
‘What horizon?’ Duggan grunted as the ship headed down into another trough.
‘See,’ the captain laughed. ‘You’re better already. Have another
biscuit.’
It was true: he felt a little better. He reached for another biscuit and kept his eyes on the horizon as the bow cut at an angle through the crest of another swell. ‘Do they always pretend they’re going to attack?’ he asked.
‘Some of them,’ the captain shrugged. ‘Like to give us a bit of a fright now and then. And sometimes they do attack. You never know.’
‘They don’t recognise our neutrality?’
The captain shrugged again. ‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Seems to be up to the crew. How trigger-happy they are. We’ve been lucky so far. But we’ve lost some good friends.’
The ship rose on another swell and Duggan scanned the horizon. There was nothing on the ocean, just more swells as far as the eye could see. Overhead, white clouds scudded eastwards at speed, across the azure sky. There were no signs of life: no birds, no ships, no aircraft.
Duggan became aware again of the small vessel’s vulnerability. It was another world out here from the investigations and diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing that followed the occasional attack on neutral Ireland’s ships by German planes or U-boats. A different world from the reports and explanations he’d seen cross G2’s desks. The crew mistook the Irish tricolour for the French one in bad light. They couldn’t identify the ship. The ship ignored radio signals to identify herself. To heave to. The error is regretted. Compensation will be paid.
Standing in front of the bridge later at the captain’s suggestion – it was the centre of the ship, he’d said, its most stable point – Duggan was conscious of how different it was from a desk at headquarters. How exposed the ships and their crews were to the vagaries of the moment. To a gunner with an itchy finger, to a snap decision by a pilot that a vessel wasn’t what she appeared to be, to a submarine with a dirty periscope that couldn’t make out clearly the flag on her side in heavy seas.
His seasickness was fading, but it was replaced now by another hollow feeling in his stomach. Ever since the war had started nearly two years earlier, he’d wondered how he would fare under fire if and when the war came to Ireland. Now he knew. This was the first time he’d faced a gun that could have spat bullets at him at the pressure of a finger. And he’d tried to turn and run. And fallen in an ignominious heap on the deck.
The temperature rose as they moved south. The tension on board eased once they reached the relative safety of neutral Portugal’s territorial waters. Even the ship seemed more relaxed, running with the Atlantic swell towards land, happy, as the captain put it, that it was once again in sight of a coast: it was never intended to be ocean-going, he told Duggan, to sail beyond sight of land.
Duggan felt well enough to shave off his week-long beard, and his gaunt cheeks began to colour again in the sunshine. He had hardly eaten during the voyage and reckoned he’d lost at least half a stone. He spent all his time on deck, not trusting himself to go below except to sleep, but he was well enough to read Bones of Contention, a collection of Frank O’Connor’s short stories. The book was a handy defence against conversations, and against questions he didn’t want to answer. Everybody left him alone: nobody suggested that he act out his cover by doing some work.
The vague outline of the coast sharpened into hills and fields and then settled into the outline of Lisbon as they entered the mouth of the Tagus and passed by the tower of Belém. Red-roofed buildings, their walls ochre and white, seemed piled on one another to create hills and valleys interspersed with church spires and domes. The summer sun was dropping into the ocean behind them, buttering the mellow colours of the city with its warm southern light. The sea breeze was blowing the smoke from the ship’s funnel ahead of them like a pointer.
They followed it upriver, past a queue of ships at anchor facing the ocean and past busy quays with all their berths occupied. They anchored in the river beyond a large waterfront square, and the ship slowly swung around to face back the way it had come. Duggan and a few of the crew, their work finished and ocean-going sweaters discarded, leaned on the starboard rails, waiting. The docks were busy with the whine of crane engines and the clanging of their metal buckets on concrete and steel plate. Overhead, the blue of the sky had deepened and shadows had etched in some of the valleys on shore. The air was still hot and heavy.
‘That’s our spot,’ Jenkins said, pointing to a similar-sized vessel with a crane swinging a bag-like container over its deck. ‘We’ll be in before nightfall. You coming ashore with us?’
�
�Sure,’ Duggan said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Antonio’s place. You ever heard of it?’
‘No,’ Duggan lied. He’d been told about it at the briefing. It was where the contact was always made with the sailor he was replacing on this trip, the sailor they’d caught smuggling a message for the German spy Hermann Goertz. Though neither politics nor spying was the sailor’s main interest. Smuggling was, which was why he was quick to cooperate with G2’s plan to have Duggan replace him on this voyage. ‘What is it?’
‘A dive,’ one of the other sailors laughed.
‘Won’t stop you joining the band, will it?’ Jenkins shot back at him. ‘Disgracing the nation with your attempt at singing.’ He dropped his cigarette butt into the oil-slicked water and pushed back from the railing. ‘Come on. Get ready.’
Duggan didn’t move, in no hurry to go back to the cabin. He inhaled the warm air and closed his eyes, feeling the ship still moving through the Atlantic swell, listening to the busy noises. He felt the heat envelop him and sweat begin to build up under his collar in spite of the breeze off the water.
He was still there an hour later when they hauled anchor and edged into the berth as the other vessel left it. It was flying a flag he didn’t recognise, and he made out the name ‘Famagusta’ on its rusty stern as it went by. As soon as they tied up, the gangway was lowered and a port official came on board while a harbour policeman took up position beside it. He watched a boxy lorry roll by, its cargo hidden under a tarpaulin.
The captain and the Portuguese official emerged from the bridge after a while and shook hands at the gangway. The captain joined Duggan at the railing as they watched the officials depart.
‘Busy place these days.’ The captain stood upright, his hands resting on the railing, as though he was still on the bridge, in command. ‘The crossroads of the world now. Been here before?’