Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  ‘Well, you would be surprised at the talent over there. And here too, I’m sure. Writers, poets, directors, actors, musicians. We plan to put on a showcase, demonstrate to these lumpen Canadians—I mean, they are very nice, but high art is a young concept here—demonstrate exactly what they have on their hands. Artists, not monsters. And we wondered—do any of you play instruments?’

  ‘Not to your high-art standards,’ said Frau Menkel pointedly. ‘Enough for a decent Musik Abend.’

  ‘A decent Musik Abend will do just fine,’ he said.

  ‘I play flute,’ offered one girl.

  ‘Harp—if you can find one,’ said another, to a ripple of laughter.

  ‘What about instruments?’ asked Frau Menkel. ‘Can you get any?’

  ‘Oh, the commandant says if we give him a list, he will do his best. The harp might be a challenge. Anyone else?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Uli softly, staring into the ripples in her coffee cup. ‘I’m a little rusty. But I play violin.’

  Nineteen

  ROSS WAS SITTING in the walled flower garden, enjoying the sun on his face, when he heard someone approaching. Unable to turn his head fully, he looked at his watch. It was six o’clock, too early for the night shift.

  A shadow fell across his face and he looked up. It was Harding, who was second in command of the Surgical Division. Harding was around fifty, with thinning hair, brilliantined into place, and deep, sunken cheeks. His hands were remarkable, long and bony as if they had been specifically designed for probing within people, sliding between bone and tissue to pluck out disease and damage.

  ‘Mind if I sit down?’ he asked.

  Ross shuffled along the bench and pulled his robe around him. ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘I thought it was time we had a complete rundown of the damage, what’s permanent and what’s not.’

  Ross steeled himself and said: ‘All right.’

  ‘If you feel strong enough?’

  ‘I’ve been here the best part of a year. I ought to be.’

  Harding looked down at a clipboard. ‘The limp is permanent. Your right leg is a half-inch shorter than the left. Not too bad. Can give you a shoe to correct it if you like, but in this day and age a bit of a war wound goes down a treat with the ladies.’

  ‘With respect, Mister Harding, I have a little more than a bit of a war wound.’

  Ross was taken aback by the flash of anger from the surgeon that came straight back at him. ‘Not compared to some of the chaps here, you haven’t. Been to the burns unit lately? Seen the pilots who melted in their cockpits, the sailors caught in burning oil? No? Perhaps I should take you there before you leave.’

  Ross had glimpsed some of them out in the garden, undergoing painful rehabilitation, faces lobster red, hands shrivelled to useless claws, skin so fragile that it had to be held together with gossamer stitches, mouths without lips, eyes without lids. ‘Sorry.’

  Harding nodded. ‘How’s the tongue?’

  ‘Still feels like it belongs to someone else.’

  ‘It wasn’t the best one I’ve seen, I’m afraid.’

  After the intruder air raid Ross had been dealt with by soldiers from the shore batteries at Thorpeness, who had found him lying in the road, a bloodied mess. One of them with some medical training had gone through the standard procedure for a broken jaw—putting a stitch through the tongue, then tying the thread to a jacket button to stop it lolling around. Unfortunately, it had become infected.

  ‘The jaw, though, is pretty good, isn’t it?’

  A section of his damaged mandible had been replaced using bone from one of his lower ribs, and everything had been pulled back into place by a medieval-looking traction device. The science of grafting and tissue ‘gardening’—encouraging growths elsewhere on the body for removal and replacement of damaged skin—was being developed in this hospital day by day.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You haven’t looked in the mirror?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should. Chest is also pretty good. Don’t think the hair will regrow on the left-hand side. Just shave the other to match. If it worries you.’

  ‘It doesn’t.’

  ‘You’ve forty per cent hearing loss in your left ear. Other one is pretty good—perhaps ten per cent, if that. You are lucky that you put your arms up. Protected your eyes. The skin on your forearms will heal well, I think. That stiff neck will go in time, too. Our main problem was the fractured skull, the thing that kept you in pain for so long. That, I am pleased to say, is right as rain now. Just had to shift some of the plates around, as it were. Relieve the pressure. Headaches?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘You see? Not a bad checklist for this place.’

  ‘Thank you, Mister Harding.’

  ‘I had a message from your father, by the way. Hopes to get up in the next few days. Says he regrets that he hasn’t … well, it’s a long way from London. It now takes the best part of a whole day to get here, if you’re lucky. He’s been bombed out twice trying, once when they hit Crewe …’

  ‘Can you send a reply?’ Ross interrupted quickly. ‘To my father?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tell him I appreciate his efforts to get here. But I would rather he didn’t come to see me for the moment.’

  ‘Mister Ross …’

  ‘Just tell him I need the time to think. About what has happened, and about what will happen. Tell him that when I was in hospital in Ipswich I heard every word he said when he spoke to me. It’s given me a lot to mull over. Tell him it’s time I made my own decisions and from now on I will. He’ll understand,’ finished Ross, not entirely sure that his father would do anything of the kind.

  Uli, nervous, sat next to the small stage, waiting for Frau Menkel to finish her recital. They were in the town hall of the nearby village. It was packed with townsfolk, all curious to see what the ‘foreigners’ could do. Things had certainly improved in the months since Hilda had disappeared. If only she’d held on.

  As Frau Menkel banged her way through some Schumann, Uli rotated her left wrist. It was still deformed, but she had practised long and hard at stretching the tendons, and now she could finger passably well. It still ached afterwards, but she was pleased with her progress. She smiled at the Canadian in the front row, who was frowning with concentration at the music. His name was Dennis. He drove supplies up to the camp once a week, he was big, shy and clumsy and she knew he was sweet on her. She did nothing to encourage him, but little to discourage him either.

  She enjoyed the attention. She had forgotten what it felt like. The last time flirting had been so uncomplicated had been … She tried to think. Not with Ross, that was for sure, because there had been the shadow of Erich. Where were they now, she wondered? And if they both came through that door, what would she do? They won’t, she reminded herself. Make the most of the here and now and the gentle courtship of someone who doesn’t know your background, foibles or former suitors.

  Applause crackled out, along with whistling and stamping as Frau Menkel finished and took a bow. Uli had asked her why she had refused repatriation. Had she been worried about being sunk on the way back? No, she’d said. It was the size of the country they had seen from the train as they crossed from Halifax to Toronto and then into the hinterland. So vast and fertile. She knew that the Germans could never make any impact over here, that somehow the British government would survive. She now believed her country was doomed.

  Uli stood, her cheeks red, trying to recall the youngster who had no fear of performing at her father’s music evenings. Half of her wished that Fritz was here now, the other half was glad that he wouldn’t see her stumble through the recital. She stepped onto the low stage and cleared her throat.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said in a quaking voice. ‘Tonight, I would like to perform a few pieces by Mozart.’

  There was more applause as she fiddled with the music stand and opened the yellowed sheet music. Uli took a deep breath, put
the bow to the strings, closed her eyes, and began to play.

  Twenty

  CAMP 020, LATCHMERE House, London: 1942

  Colonel Donald Ross thought long and hard about silver linings these days. As he waited for the man seated at the opposite side of the table to compose himself, he considered the case of his son. Maimed, unwilling to see him, claiming ‘he wasn’t ready’, whatever that meant.

  He wanted to tell his son just how valuable his injuries had proved, to make them seem, if not worthwhile, then bearable. The frantic radio traffic from the Abwehr between Berlin and Rotterdam after that strange Dornier raid on the house in Suffolk had provided a valuable tool for ISOS, the signals and cryptography people. For once they knew exactly what the fuss was about and could look for key phrases and place names in the messages.

  One of the transmissions proposed a wild theory that somehow Heydrich was involved in the bombing. The Colonel knew Canaris’s Abwehr were suspicious of Heydrich, but that took the biscuit. As if Hitler would let his top men go swanning round the skies in Messerschmitts and the like.

  Still, once the boffins knew what to look for, the code fell surprisingly quickly. With this breakthrough, the Abwehr’s transmissions were now routinely decoded and passed to MI5. Hardly a single spy landed in England without the security services knowing in advance. Those that did sneak through usually gave themselves away quickly enough. Ross’s job these days was to determine which of the hapless spies should go to the Twenty Committee (designated XX—double cross) for turning back on the enemy and which should be incarcerated and possibly even hanged.

  The oily character in front of him was one such hapless spy, ostensibly a Frenchman called Savigny, who had made it to England from Brittany by small motor launch and who claimed he wished to join de Gaulle’s Free French. He had gone through the London Reception Centre in Clapham, where all refugees and aliens who made it to Britain were processed. The enemy knew about this centre and had schooled its agents to try and pass through it without arousing suspicion.

  Savigny’s downfall was that, if he’d made it to England as claimed, his motor cruiser would have had to pass unharmed through several British minefields on its way to the mainland. Like all other suspects, he was quickly dispatched to Latchmere House, which had been rechristened Camp 020.

  Savigny had already been thoroughly searched and was now dressed in the regulation Latchmere uniform of flannels and a coat with a large white diamond on the breast. In his instruction leaflet, Ross had postulated that there were two kinds of interrogator, the Breaker and the Investigator. They employed totally different skills—the first involved obtaining the confession of treachery and deceit, the second drawing out the background, list of contacts, nature of the mission and so forth. Ross could do both, although it was best, he found, if interrogators specialised. Tin-Eye Stephens, for instance, was an excellent breaker, but a useless investigator.

  Savigny had already been well and truly broken by Stephens, who used a mixture of threats—execution—and psychological menaces. Stephens loved to stoke the rumours about the horrors that awaited those sent to Cell Fourteen which, in reality, was just like any other cell. However, this small room had grown in the fevered imagination of those interned at Camp 020 until it was thought of as the inner circle of hell. The mere mention of it broke some inmates instantly. What none of them knew was that the one thing Stephens absolutely forbade was the use of violence—not because of squeamishness, Colonel Ross knew, but because Tin-Eye maintained that ‘it lowered the quality of the intelligence’.

  Savigny, though, had not been hard to break: he was another of the Abwehr agents whose motives were far from ideological—a mix of money and blackmail had driven him to agree to work for the Germans. Colonel Ross despised him for his frailty, but he couldn’t let that show. It was his turn to be the pleasant half of Stephens’s ‘blow hot, blow cold’ technique, whereby a kindly investigator alternated with one who acted like a baying dog.

  There was no stenographer present in the room, because they were using ‘M’ devices, the new recording microphones that were fitted into the light fixtures. Ross wasn’t sure about these, but Stephens swore by them. Interviews were taped on the new wire-spool devices that had been bought from the Yanks, and transcribed later. Stephens maintained that the absence of a third person scribbling notes in the corner made for a more conducive atmosphere for obtaining confessions.

  Savigny was relaxed now, thinking that the worst was over, and he put his hands on the table and interlaced his fingers, waiting for the interrogation to begin. Colonel Ross reached for the packet of Weights, shook a cigarette out, ready to offer it to the prisoner, and waited in vain for his brain to formulate something. With mounting horror, he realised that, for the first time in his life, he had no idea what his first question should be.

  ‘Torpedoes running.’

  Every man held his breath as the shudder passed through the hull. Stares fixed on the clocks, men counted under their breaths. Forty seconds had passed when they heard the dull crump of an explosion.

  ‘Midships,’ said Prinz, peering intently through the periscope’s eyepiece. A second explosion. ‘Stern.’

  A ripple of relief ran through the boat. It was an armed British tanker, straggling behind the convoy because of engine trouble. Now they had to get out of there. Gone were the days when the British sent every destroyer in the area searching for a submarine, leaving the merchant ships naked, to be taken at will by the U-boat captain bold enough to slip past the hunters. Now they sent out just one or two escorts, which scanned the area with their damned ASDIC echo-locators, while the remainder corralled the transports.

  ‘Take her down, Chief. Seventy metres. Left full rudder. All ahead full. Give me all she has for fifteen minutes.’

  Erich, as cipher clerk, no longer operated the torpedo computer but was a spare pair of hands in the control room to assist with whatever emergencies arose.

  Schnee started yelling. ‘She’s Morsing a distress signal. Ocean Pride. Torpedoed by submarine. Sinking to stern. Then her position. She’s going down.’ A ragged cheer. Another pennant to fly as they sailed into Lorient.

  It had been a successful winter patrol. With America in the war, its ships were now fair game, and the tonnage totals had crept up. Resupplied with torpedoes and provisions by milch-cow submarines, U-40 had prowled the eastern seaboard of the US and Canada, hunting alone and, at BdU’s command, in packs when the pickings were rich, making the Allies suffer badly. Now they were feasting in Torpedo Alley, south of Greenland, where Allied spotter planes—either from Canada or Scotland—could not reach and the ships were, therefore, denied air cover.

  ‘Screws. Faint. Astern,’ said the hydrophone operator, a panicky note in his voice.

  ‘They didn’t waste much time. Launch Bold, Hinkel. Ten-minute delay’

  Erich’s job. He ran back to the rear torpedo tubes, issuing orders as he went. ‘Break out the Bold canisters. Set for ten.’

  Bold was the latest thing in anti-sonar devices. The canisters launched through the rear tubes contained a mixture of calcium and zinc which, on contact with water, produced hydrogen bubbles that could completely fool a sonar operator. They could be set to hover at a particular depth and would throw off bubbles for a good twenty-five minutes.

  As soon as two canisters were launched, Erich worked his way back to the control room, through the engine compartment, wondering how much more of this life he could take. He wasn’t alone. Prinz himself had begun to say some strange things. He questioned Admiral Dönitz’s sanity in adhering to every whim of the Führer and was also depressed by the Americans entering the war. ‘I have seen their shipyards,’ he said. ‘They can build ships faster than we can sink them.’

  If they were going to lose the war, what was the point of all this loss of life—both in the U-boats and the merchant ships? Erich knew that Prinz was tired, but the U-40’s senior officer had to be careful. The captain of U-154 was rumoured to be unde
r sentence of death for replacing the required portrait of Hitler with a seascape and for making ‘defeatist’ comments. The old Erich, the Hitler Youth Erich, would have cheered such a decision. Now he thought it idiotic, to waste the life of such a valuable tactician. Perhaps he was just tired, too. Perhaps he just wished he were at home, in bed with Uli, a couple of kids fast asleep in their nursery.

  He ducked through to the radio room. The destroyer’s screws were still sounding in the hydrophone man’s ears, still coming after them, but some distance behind and slowing. Erich checked his watch. He imagined the canisters starting to bubble, the milky cloud dispersing into a long streak, the sound waves bouncing off it.

  ‘He’s turned towards the Bold,’ shouted Erich. Prinz managed a thin smile. They weren’t out of trouble yet.

  They all heard the detonations and the submarine shuddered lightly. A whole series of explosions, one after the other, crunched together into a long, continuous rumble.

  ‘Hedgehog,’ Erich said to Prinz, who nodded. Underwater cluster-bombs, twenty-four of them, launched in an oval to surround a U-boat, to smash it from all sides. It was a lethal tactic. Another growling in the depths and a ripple ran through U-40 as the shock waves reached it. This time the destroyer had hedgehogged a mass of bubbles. What happens, thought Erich, when the sonar operators learn to tell the difference between decoy and target?

  Part Three

  1943–5

  Twenty-One

  LONDON: 1943

  ‘Ten pounds for the night.’

  Ross slowed his step, and turned back to look at the woman. Even in the diffuse glimmer lighting of the blackout, he could make out that she was a tall brunette, with a prominent beauty spot and kohl-ringed eyes. She was dressed in a slightly ratty knee-length fur coat and glossy high heels. The stockings looked real, the crocodile handbag seemed genuine, the diamonds dangling from her ears were paste. She was a beguiling mix of the pristine and the shopworn.