The Hansa Protocol

by Norman Russell

  Admiral Holland let his gaze drift across the lines of ships as far as the western shore and its huddles of buildings, almost lost to view in the dullness of the fine rain. Years in a warm Admiralty office had not diminished his immunity to bad weather, and he stood quite unmoved by the wet and cold of the cliff.

  ‘I don’t see what these hot-heads can do,’ he said. ‘The whole shoreline is guarded by soldiers of the Scottish regiments. The entire area is virtually sealed off until the thirtieth, when they lift anchors.’

  Colonel Kershaw did not reply. He stood wrapped in his cloak, looking fixedly out and away from the fleet towards the dull, fermenting waters of the North Sea. He was very still. Holland stole a glance at him. What was he thinking about? There was nothing of interest there, though far out to sea the winking lights of some kind of vessel could be seen, either at anchor, or proceeding very slowly north.

  Admiral Holland stirred restlessly. He was chafing at Kershaw’s absorbed silence.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked testily. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘Heligoland.’

  ‘Heligoland? Well, you can’t see that from here. It’s an island about forty miles off the German coast. There’s no one there but a few herders and fisherfolk. But I appreciate your mentioning it. We ceded it to Germany in ’90, as you know, and it’s obvious that they’ll establish a naval base there. Really, you’d have thought the Great Powers— but there, the Germans have done nothing in Heligoland yet.’

  ‘No, they’ve done nothing there yet, Holland. But they will.’

  Kershaw stopped for a moment, and looked down the path towards the grim, rain-soaked tower below them. There seemed to be no life about the place, just rain, and a quiet breeze. It was too quiet! He recalled the previous day’s interminable railway journey from London. A man had got on the train with them in London, changed whenever they changed, and was with them when they had transferred from the main line on to the Highland Railway.

  It wouldn’t do, at this juncture, to mention that man to Holland. He had almost certainly not seen the man, as he had been careful to keep out of their sight as much as was possible. He’d been a soldier once, but the proud mien had deserted him. It had been replaced by a seedy, furtive ugliness ….

  They reached the rough track that ran in front of Craigarvon Tower.

  ‘Come, Kershaw’ said Admiral Holland, ‘it’s time for us to think and re-think, and that can best be done in the shelter of the Tower. Things are too quiet here. Suspiciously quiet. Nothing’s happening, so there’s nothing we can do. What on earth can these madmen be contemplating?’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ said Kershaw, ‘it will be to do with explosives. Something terrible is contemplated – “a victory beyond your wildest dreams”, as Baron von Dessau told his dangerous rabble in Berlin. Why hedge the matter about with ifs and buts? That victory can only be an act of destruction by explosives associated with the great fleet down there in Dunnock Sound.’

  He thought for a moment of the telegraph message that he had received earlier that day from Inspector Box in London. It had suggested very sinister possibilities. Well, he had the secret means of making investigations of his own. Holland could be told whatever was necessary when the time was ripe.

  Holland made no effort to refute what Kershaw had said. The two men walked soberly across the wet grass to the ancient tower of Craigarvon. The single narrow door was opened to them by a uniformed marine with a fixed bayonet on his rifle. They passed inside, and the door was firmly slammed and bolted. Craigarvon Tower had become what it had often been in the past, an impregnable fortress.

  ‘Inspector Box! My pleasure, I’m sure! We don’t often see you over here. Come in, and see if you can find a chair somewhere. And you, Sergeant Knollys.’

  Mr Mack’s spacious domain at the Home Office looked to Box rather like a roofed scrapyard. As they stepped over the threshold from a tall, narrow corridor, the two detectives almost collided with the burnt and detached door of a free-standing safe, which had clearly been blown off its hinges in some kind of explosion. It was twisted out of shape, and its green paint had been scorched by fire. There were similar pieces of wreckage arrayed around the room, and leaning against the walls.

  Box and Knollys picked their way across the bare boards between piles of yellowing documents and manuals, and sat down in two Windsor chairs drawn up in front of Mr Mack’s massive desk. There was not an inch of space visible. Most of the desk was covered in small boxes and pieces of iron pipe. Everything seemed to have a brown-paper label attached. The air was thick with pipe smoke, and the ceiling stained yellow with the tobacco-smoke of decades.

  ‘What can I do for you, Inspector Box?’ asked Mr Mack. He seemed genuinely delighted to see them, and his old face managed a wintry smile. He was wearing his usual rusty black suit, to which he had added a blue woollen muffler.

  ‘I’d like a little chat with you about shells,’ said Box. ‘Just a little introduction, if you see what I mean. I expect you know all there is to know about shells.’

  Mr Mack joined his fingers together, and looked critically at his visitors.

  ‘Well, Mr Box, it’s very kind of you to say so. But I’d like to get clear in my mind what you mean by shells. I take it you don’t mean seashells? No, well I thought you didn’t. Just my little joke. But there are shells and shells, Mr Box. First, there’s your common-or-garden shells. Then there’s your armour-piercing shells. And your high explosive shells – beautiful, they are. Then there’s your shrapnel shell, your thin-walled, your artillery shell, your naval shell—’

  ‘Pause there, Mr Mack, I beg of you,’ said Box, holding up his hand to stem the flow of words. ‘The naval shell, I think, is what I’d like a little chat about. A few informal words, if I may put it that way.’

  Mr Mack rummaged around among the detritus on his desk until he found a short clay pipe, which he proceeded to light. There followed a period of snuffling, interspersed with a number of throaty coughs. Mr Mack’s mild, pale eyes began to water.

  ‘The naval shell, Mr Box, and you, Mr Knollys, comes in two kinds, the armour-piercing and the high-explosive. They have a sharp point at the front, and a fuse in the base. The point sometimes has a soft steel cap, which absorbs the shock of first impact, so that the shell can penetrate the armour before it bursts. They burst, you know. That’s the theory, anyway.’

  ‘It’s amazing, Mr Mack, the things you know. And these naval shells – they go into the ship’s guns—’

  ‘They go into the ship’s magazines, Mr Box. You’ve heard of a magazine, haven’t you? You’ve got to be careful about sparks and naked lights in magazines. More often than not they’ll have a copper floor. Tread carefully, if ever you find yourself in a warship’s magazine.’

  ‘They’re in racks—’ Box ventured.

  Mr Mack hauled himself up with a sigh, and pulled open one or two drawers in a tallboy. With a little bleat of triumph he pulled out a backless book, which he flopped down on his desk. For a few moments he began worrying at the pages until he had found what he wanted.

  ‘There you are. There’s a diagram of a battleship. It’ll save you making wild guesses about racks, and so on. That’s HMS Hazard. A lovely ship, that, of eighteen thousand tons. There’s your magazine, you see.’

  Mr Mack pointed to part of the diagram with a heavy index finger pitted with tiny blue points of embedded gunpowder, one of the minor disadvantages of spending his life with dangerous explosives.

  ‘Moving away from the stern, we pass over four compartments of the ship, and then, below where you see that twelve-inch gun in its barbette – its turret, you know – you’ll see the magazine.’

  Mr Mack, warming to his subject, seized a magnifying glass from his desk, polished it quickly on his muffler, and handed it to Box.

  ‘See? Notice that it’s below the water-line, for safety’s sake. And below the magazine, there’s a separate shell room, and the revolving hoist, that takes the
shells up to the barbette.’

  Inspector Box ran the magnifying glass across the diagram, noting the vast engine rooms, the coal bunkers, and the boiler rooms. He silently marvelled at the sheer size of the great warship.

  ‘There are four more magazines here,’ he said, ‘sited beyond the boiler-rooms towards the prow.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Mack, sitting down again in his chair, and puffing away at his clay pipe. ‘They’re to service the two forward gun turrets. So now you see where all the shells are kept on a big warship. Is there anything else you’d like me to tell you?’ He added, very shrewdly, ‘I suppose all this is the other end of The Belvedere business?’ Box nodded his assent.

  Sergeant Knollys had said nothing since he and Box had entered Mr Mack’s smoky Home Office kingdom. But he had been eyeing the old explosives expert speculatively while Box had been examining the diagram. There was a hint of mischief in his eyes when he asked a question.

  ‘I was wondering, Mr Mack, why you have these plans of warships here in your office. Is there a purpose in that, or do you just like warships?’

  ‘Sergeant!’

  Box’s tone held mild reproof, but Mr Mack only chuckled.

  ‘Seen through me, haven’t you, Sergeant Knollys? Well, everyone to his trade. That goes for me, as well as you. I have these plans of warships so that I can contrive ways of blowing them up! Devise tricks and traps to send these great vessels to the bottom of the ocean! It’s all part of the business of knowing your enemies. Try to think what they’d do, and see if it’s possible. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.’

  Arnold Box thought once more of the over-confident admiral, and his pride in the great battleship HMS Fearnought, which had apparently arrived in Caithness on the previous Thursday, after its journey up from Portsmouth.

  ‘If ever you felt like turning your skills in the direction of HMS Fearnought, sir,’ asked Box, ‘what particular explosives would you use to send her to the bottom of the ocean?’

  Mr Mack did not reply for a moment. He glanced shrewdly at Box, and then once again hauled himself to his feet.

  ‘Explosives? I’d use whatever came to hand, Mr Box. Trinitrophenol, nitrocellulose – to put it more simply, I’d use the contents of the magazine themselves as my fiendish device! There’s no point in taking a bomb into a warship when it’s carrying enough high explosives in its magazines to lift the decks!’

  Mr Mack beckoned them into an adjoining room, which proved to be a very untidy workshop. There was a metal-topped bench, a lathe, a small furnace, and a jumbled collection of pieces of broken machinery. A grimy slit of a window looked out on to the rain-soaked expanse of St James’s Park.

  ‘This is what I’d use, gentlemen,’ said Mr Mack, dragging a kind of oil-covered drum from beneath the bench. He made a half-hearted attempt to wipe it clean with a grimy cloth.

  ‘This is what you’d call a detonator. Ridgeway’s Limpet Igniter. A nifty piece of work, just eight inches in diameter. See those magnets? And the timing mechanism? This one’s broken, but you can see the idea. The magnets clamp the device to the fuse in the base of a shell. You set the clock, and when the time that you’ve set comes round, that steel rod in the centre there activates the fuse plate, and the shell explodes.’

  Mr Mack turned some exposed clockwork mechanism with his hand, and the steel rod shot out with an alarming thud of metal. He threw the device back into the gloomy recess under the bench, and wiped his hands on the grimy rag.

  ‘And then, of course, Mr Box, the other shells in the magazine explode in sympathy. What we call the “brisant” effect. And the magazine’s a confined space, with armoured steel walls, so the force of the magazine going up blows the ship to pieces. And that sympathy …. that “brisant” effect, can spread to neighbouring ships, and then – well, then, Mr Box, you could lose the whole fleet.’

  15

  The Watcher in the Fields

  Angus Macmillan lived on the shores of Dunnock Sound in a village that was rapidly being turned from a poor rural street of cottages subsisting on stone-cutting, to a poor rural street covered in coal dust. For over a year, colliers had come round Duneansby Head from England, and dumped their cargoes into the old stone-yards along the waterside. Now, Angus Macmillan, pulling a handcart that wet Saturday through the mud towards the Naval Quay, could breathe in the fine black coal dust as well as the yellow dust from the stone quarries.

  A group of neighbours watched Angus as he passed them. He waved a hand in greeting, but they knew that his time was precious, and he didn’t stop to chat. He’d been a wanderer, had Angus, and was not often at home there, in Thirlstane village. When he was, he’d drop into the alehouse, and tell them tales of another Scotland, a land of bagpipes, and grouse moors and distilleries, and a host of other fine things. Here, on the shores of the Sound, there was only hard work, poverty and dust.

  The nice thing about Angus Macmillan was that he always fitted in immediately when he returned from his journeying. He would open his rambling and ruinous flint cottage in the trees above the road, one or other of them would bring him up some kindling, and there he would be. This time he’d brought a little wife and her taciturn mother to live with him. The little wife was flighty, you could see it in her eyes. Angus had better watch out. And the little wife too. For Angus Macmillan was known to have a foul, unforgiving temper, though with those he liked he could be pleasant enough.

  Angus Macmillan spoke the Gaelic, though not well. His family had come from those parts, and his father had been a Thirlstane man, though he’d gone abroad long years ago, and married a foreign woman. Angus had always been a wanderer. He’d been to Clydeside and worked in the bowels of ships, readying and priming the coal bunkers. Then he’d gone to England. Now, it seemed, the new fleet depot had brought him back to Thirlstane. With his skills, he could make seven shillings a day down at the coaling basin.

  As Macmillan dragged his handcart on to the setts of the Naval Quay he was challenged rather half-heartedly by two armed marines. He grinned at them as he began to undo the ropes holding a tarpaulin over the cart.

  ‘Och, away with your guns, lads. You know quite well who I am.’

  ‘Aye, we ken that fine,’ one of the two marines replied, ‘we’ve seen your ugly mug off and on since last autumn. But you’re a real will-o’-the-wisp, aren’t you, Angus? Flitting round, here and there …. You’re like a conjurer with his tricks: now you see it, now you don’t!’

  Angus Macmillan laughed.

  ‘I’m a ship man, Soldier, and ships are always on the move. A ship man follows the ships! Where would they all be, with their fine vessels and their tall funnels, if it weren’t for the likes of me? It’s very fine for you fellows, too, strutting around here on the quay with those rifles, but there’s no glamour down there, among the boilers.’

  He had brought his cart right to the edge of a wooden landing-stage where a trim steam-cutter lay anchored. It contrasted sharply with the grimy bunkering vessels anchored further along the quay. One of the marines put down his rifle and helped Macmillan to drag a polished wooden box down from the cart.

  ‘There’s not much glamour up here, either, is there, Jimmy?’ said the other marine. ‘Just standing still in the cold, challenging the likes of poor Angus there.’

  ‘Och, stop your whining. Let’s get the man out to the Fearnought.’

  It was 21 January. The following Monday the coaling-up of the fleet was to take place in readiness for the 25th. For a whole frantic day the air would be dark with the dust of thousands of tons of coal emptied by unending lines of men through the deck-ports into the bunkers of the warships. It was essential that the chutes and the door-mechanisms functioned without faults. Angus Macmillan was skilled in that particular aspect of heavy coaling operations.

  Within minutes, Macmillan and his box of tools were on board the steam-cutter which began its journey, weaving skilfully through the cruisers towards HMS Fearnought. The two marines on the quay resu
med their watchful guard.

  ‘There’s that skulking spy again,’ said the man called Jimmy, motioning with his head in the direction of a well-dressed but seedy man of about forty leaning against the wall of a small brick office. ‘He was there yesterday, too. Hey, you! Clear off out of it!’

  The man rolled himself upright off the wall with a kind of studied insolence that made the marine flush with anger, and strolled off into the rain-soaked stony village behind the quay gates.

  Later in the day, Angus Macmillan was brought back to the pier in the cutter. His box was hauled up on to his handcart, and he began his slow uphill journey home. He reached his cottage, and his mother-in-law came out to help him lift the heavy box down prior to dragging it into the house.

  The cottage lay half hidden in a clump of stunted oaks. It was in a state of semi-dereliction, but at one time must have been home to a large family. There were four large rooms on the ground floor, and a number of disused store-rooms facing into the trees on the hillside that rose above the Thirlstane road.

  Once across the threshold, Colin McColl shed the strong Scots accent that he had employed as Angus Macmillan. He looked at the woman who was supposed to be his mother-in-law, and read the signs of something amiss in her furrowed brow.

  ‘All has gone well, Frau Feissen,’ he said, ‘but you look vexed. What has happened?’

  Frau Feissen shrugged her shoulders. She motioned McColl to follow her into one of the sparsely furnished rooms of the dwelling, where a fire burned fitfully on an open stone hearth.

  ‘It is Miss Ottilie,’ said Frau Feissen. ‘You’d better do what you can to placate her. She’s still seething about what was done to Fritz Schneider. She vented her rage on me this morning – with no result, as you may imagine! I think that, tonight, it will be your turn.’

  Frau Feissen turned as Ottilie entered the room. The older woman pulled a wry face at McColl, and slipped away, leaving the murderous Scotsman and Ottilie Seligmann alone together in the firelit room.