Convoy North (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Well,’ Napper said hastily. ‘I see your point, of course, but don’t you bloody involve me.’ He dodged the threatening fist and managed to open the messroom door and slide to safety. Once inside he sank down on the bench running alongside the mess table and blinked in agitation. He found his hands were shaking. Mutiny was very, very nasty and although Napper didn’t know quite how it worked out aboard a merchant ship he did know he had to shift the buck very quickly indeed, and that meant having another word with Cutler and being rather more forthcoming than last time. Cutler had seemed already to have a suspicion so he would have a ready ear.

  After allowing the disaffected seaman time to bugger off, Napper climbed to the bridge. Arrived there, he sensed an atmosphere: ructions between Kemp and Theakston? Not his business. He approached Cutler and saluted through the driving snow.

  ‘Mr Cutler, sir?’

  ‘What is it, Petty Officer Napper?’

  ‘What we was talking about earlier sir. What you asked me about —’

  ‘Right! Go on, I’m listening.’

  Napper reported the conversation with the crew member. Cutler asked, ‘He approached you, did he?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘What for?’

  Napper stared. ‘I just said, sir. Round Robin...from the ship’s crew like —’

  ‘Yes. But what precisely was he asking?’

  There was a longish pause, then Napper said, ‘I — I dunno, sir.’

  ‘He must have asked something.’

  ‘Yessir. But —’

  ‘He didn’t say and you didn’t ask. I’d have expected better than that of a Po. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yessir. No, sir.’ Napper, flustered now, felt his face going red beneath the layers of wool that almost obscured it. Bloody little ponce, young enough to be his son, talking to him like that. He’d been daft not to have approached the Commodore: the ship wasn’t RN and Kemp, he wasn’t the pusser sort who’d turn his back on a rating who addressed him direct rather than through proper service channels.

  ‘Well?’

  In a surly tone Napper said, ‘He spoke of the prisoner, that’s all I know, sir. Point is, the crew’s upset about that bloke being lost for’ard. They don’t think it should have happened.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the prisoner?’

  ‘I dunno, sir.’

  ‘H’m.’ Silence; the Hardraw Falls moved slowly backwards towards her Russian landfall, nearer and nearer to the nastiness, as Napper saw it, of Comrade Stalin’s iron fist. You couldn’t blame the crew for being uneasy. Napper was uneasy too, for all sorts of reasons — the Nazi himself, the damage to the ship and the resulting danger, the likelihood of further German attack, and his own personal problem which in the end might mean an enforced visit to a Russian quack after all. Cutler ended the silence abruptly. ‘All right, PO. Ears to the ground and report as necessary. Do a little discreet probing, and in the meantime I’ll have a word with the Commodore and Captain Theakston. What was the man’s name?’

  Oh, bugger, Napper thought. He said woodenly, ‘I dunno, sir.’

  ‘Jeez!’

  III

  Theakston said, ‘It sounds like Swile. Able seaman. A bolshie sort.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ Kemp asked.

  Theakston nodded. ‘Aye, he could be. This sort of thing’s always potentially dangerous — but I don’t need to tell you.’ He gave one of his rare smiles. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, Commodore. Your RN cap badge keeps on making me forget you’re one of us basically. The grey-funnel lads look at things differently.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Kemp said. In the RN discipline was maintained, at any rate in the gate-and-gaiters world of the capital ships, under the overall threat of the Naval Discipline Act and King’s Regulations; merchant shipmasters had no such sanction to back them up beyond a bad discharge at the end of the voyage. Discipline had to be maintained by the sheer force of personality of the master and his officers, maintained over a crew that was much more individualist than any warship’s company.

  Theakston broke into Kemp’s thoughts. ‘They see a Jonah. That’s obvious.’

  ‘Yes. Von Hagen — equally obviously.’

  ‘I’d watch it if I were you, Commodore.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Why, the Nazi. There could be trouble.’

  ‘You don’t mean they might try to get him?’

  Theakston nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  Kemp gave an incredulous laugh. ‘That’d be madness, sheer insanity! They wouldn’t have a hope in hell —’

  ‘I don’t know so much. A concerted attack, a rush of men against your sentry. Would you open fire, Commodore, if that happened? Somehow I don’t think you would.’

  Kemp said, ‘We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. I don’t believe we will, not for a moment. What would be the point, anyway?’

  Theakston shrugged. ‘Aroused passions don’t always worry about a point, do they? I could quote many an instance...if Swile stirs them up to it, I’d not call it impossible by a long chalk.

  Of course, I agree with what you said just now — madness. It would be. We’d not get much of a reception in Archangel, not from the British, not from the Russians. But I never underestimate the destructive power of Jonahs, Commodore —’ He broke off. ‘I’m teaching my grandmother again!’

  ‘Grandmother,’ Kemp repeated in a curious tone, and Theakston gave him an enquiring look. ‘I happen to have a grand-mother.’

  ‘Still alive, d’you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Old, of course, very old. Seafaring background — my grandfather and great-grandfather were both square-rigged masters.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  Kemp said, ‘She believed in Jonahs, too. She’d heard so many stories. So have I — from her. Many times. She’s got repetitive in her old age.’ Kemp’s thoughts, by a natural mental process, had gone back across the lonely, bitter sea to the cottage in Meopham. In the last conversation he’d had with Mary, on the phone back in Oban, she had hinted that his grandmother wasn’t too good, feeling the cold...He brought himself back to the present, sharply. ‘Very well, Captain. I’ll have my ratings alerted.’

  IV

  Swile had done a lot of talking around the ship, having worked himself up into an inflamed state of mind. His words had penetrated and all hands were thinking hard thoughts about the Nazi agent. Swile had hinted, no more so far, that the ship would be better off without him. He was received with jeers: sure, the ship would be better off without a Jerry aboard, but what could be done about it? Why worry anyway? There wasn’t far to go now to Archangel, and the rumour said the Nazi was to be handed over to the Russians.

  ‘Bloody likely I don’t think,’ Swile said, thumping a fist down on the mess table. His face was blue with the cold: he’d just come in from a turn at the collision bulkhead, surrounded by all that frozen metal and a slop of water from time to time that froze immediately it had entered and turned the compartment into a skating rink. There was a bruise on Swile’s cheek where, as the result of a skid, he had impacted against one of the shoring beams. ‘Buzzes...they’re not always right, we all know that. Put around deliberate, half the time. Stands to reason, they’re not going to hand a Nazi spy over to the Russians — he’ll be wanted in UK.’

  ‘So what? Where do we come in?’

  ‘We don’t want the sod aboard all the way home, that’s what. For one thing — look, he’s a kind of bloody magnet, right? The Jerries’ll want him back. We know that — there was that Jerry cruiser. That won’t be the only try, will it? Homeward bound, they’ll be waiting for us, the whole bloody German fleet will!’

  Swile spent the greater part of his off-watch hours that after-noon in persuasion, elaborating on the threat posed by the Nazi’s presence aboard. Hook the German away, he said — surprise the Naval sentry, that wouldn’t be difficult — then he remembered he’d spoken of the German to that Napper. Well, he could cover that, stop any extr
a guard by having another word with Napper and disperse any anxieties. He went on: hook von Hagen out of the cabin. But not just yet. They would wait till the ship was almost into Archangel and the attention of the Commodore and his assistant was on the business of safe entry through the ice, then they would attack.

  And then what?

  Hide the Nazi away, Swile said. Hide him and then at the right moment produce him, but produce him into Russian custody. With Russian port officials, and probably the secret police, aboard they couldn’t go wrong. Kemp wouldn’t have a chance. The Russians would be grateful and the Hardraw Falls would be free of its Jonah. And by the time they joined a homeward convoy, von Hagen’s delivery would be bound to have become known to the Nazis and there would be no special attention paid to the ship. So what about it?

  Nothing about it was the general verdict: Swile had gone round the bend. Where could you hide a bloke so he wouldn’t be found? You wouldn’t have a hope. It wasn’t as though he could be nabbed and hustled away unnoticed. There would have to be a fight to get him out of naval custody.

  ‘Just you wait,’ Swile said.

  V

  The cement box had been constructed and Amory reported that the collision bulkhead could take more strain. They were able to move a little faster. But Theakston was adamant that his ship would not be turned back again. They must make the best way they could astern. By this time the Hardraw Falls was only about some eighty miles from the entry to the White Sea — say, thirteen hours’ steaming at their new speed — with another two hundred and forty miles to Archangel itself through enclosed waters. There had been no further enemy attacks and Kemp believed they were safe now in that regard.

  ‘Fingers crossed, though,’ he said.

  ‘Aye. The snow’s thinning. We’re going to be visible again if there’s anything around.’ Theakston lifted his binoculars and examined what there was of a horizon. There wasn’t much but it was tending to extend as the snowfall lessened. He looked down at his decks: the ship was a moving snowdrift, with the stuff piled everywhere, thickly, half-way up the after end of the central island superstructure and against the fo’c’sle, with the windlass kept as clear as possible and in working order so that the anchors could be used if necessary as they made the final port approach. As well as the snow, there was ice in plenty, so much topweight of it that the ship was a little below her marks. The wind was still bitter, painfully so to exposed flesh. Inside his thick gloves, Theakston’s fingers were numb, no feeling in them at all other than a dull pain like toothache. His feet were the same: Russian convoys, he thought, you can keep them...as so often on this trip he thought again about his wife. No news, nothing at all, the lot of any seaman in wartime, and it was no use hoping for any on arrival at Archangel either. The PQ convoy itself was carrying the mail and no more would come through until the next sailing from a UK port. They would all have to wait for that. The ship was likely to be in Archangel for the whole of the winter now: the collision bulkhead and the torn bows would have to be repaired and at any moment the ice would close the port and that would be that.

  Theakston had spoken of this to Kemp. Kemp said it would be a pound to a penny the Hardraw Falls would be left with a care and maintenance party while the rest of the crew and the naval contingent were entrained for Murmansk to take passage in the next homeward convoy.

  ‘And von Hagen?’ Theakston had asked.

  Kemp said heavily, ‘What happens to him depends on our naval liaison staff in Archangel. I don’t seen any hope for him.’

  ‘Anything more from Napper?’

  ‘He seems to think it’s died down.’

  ‘Von Hagen’d be better off left to my crew! Better than the Russians.’

  ‘Perhaps. But that’s not a philosophy we can afford to indulge in, Captain.’

  Theakston, recalling that conversation now, thought again about his sick wife: he couldn’t afford to spend the winter iced up in Archangel with Dora on her own and missing him, but the ship had to have an officer left in charge. Maybe Amory...Amory had no home ties. But, of course, that wouldn’t be Theakston’s decision. Once his owners had been informed of the situation, orders would come through and he just had to wait. Kemp would be all right: they wouldn’t leave a convoy Commodore kicking his heels in a Russian port.

  Throughout the ship, as the end of the outward run loomed, others were having similar thoughts of news and home. Cutler wondered if he might pick up those slender threads with Roz. There could be a chance; if there wasn’t, well, there would be other girls looking for a good time in the midst of war, chasing that good time avidly, in fact, in case it was the last they ever had.

  Petty Officer Napper was wondering how long the swelling was going to last: he didn’t want to go home with that, though it would be nice to have the comforts and the wife’s attention to his many ills. He was wondering, too, if he would be able to re-stock his cure-all kit in Archangel. Or even if it would be wise: the coms could have some weird ideas on medicine for all he knew, they were a primitive lot and probably unhygienic with it. But he was getting short of aperients, and that was important. The Russians must have something in that line, even if it was only old-fashioned stuff like Gregory powder, or liquorice powder, or Epsom salts or such...Napper’s wife swore by Epsom salts but Napper himself found them not strong enough unless you took a triple dose and that was painful to say the least, talk about griping pains in the stomach! Once, Napper hadn’t been for a fortnight, during which he had taken everything he could think of but with a nil result, and then at last he’d taken an enormous dose of Epsom salts that acted as a catalyst, making the last fourteen days’ aperients explode together in one God Almighty go.

  Napper was thinking about this when he stepped gingerly out on to the open deck. The ice was hell and very dangerous but could be negotiated so long as you kept a tight grip on the lifelines, and exercise was necessary to help keep things working internally. Moving along the starboard side of the after well-deck, past the cargo hatches invisible under the lying snow, he saw that the visibility had increased a good deal and the snow was coming down thinly and half-heartedly although still propelled against his body by that terrible east wind, a wind that had never agreed with him and always made him feel more out of sorts than was his norm.

  Then, dimly through the overcast that was still with the ship, he saw the loom of a vessel away off the starboard bow. He gave a yell towards the bridge just as Cutler had reported to the Commodore. A moment later there was the flash of a signal lamp from the unknown ship.

  On the bridge, Leading Signalman Corrigan reported the challenge. ‘One of ours, sir!’

  ‘Make the reply,’ Kemp said.

  Corrigan sent out the answer to the challenge and then reported, ‘She’s made her pendant number, sir. Neath, sir.’

  One of the cruiser escorts. ‘A little late,’ Kemp said unsteadily, but there was enormous relief in his voice.

  ‘She asks, do you require assistance, sir.’

  For form’s sake Kemp lifted and eye at Theakston, who gave a shrug. Kemp said, ‘Make: “Thank you but do not require assistance currently. Glad to have you standing by should I need a tow.”’

  After Kemp’s signal had been acknowledged, and the lean lines of the cruiser had become fully visible, more signalling came across. The convoy had been diverted into Murmansk and the battleships and cruisers of the Home Fleet had engaged the German heavy ships; there had been losses on both sides but the German force had broken off the action and steamed away to the south, shadowed by a cruiser squadron. The remainder of the PQ escort had entered Murmansk with the main body of the convoy.

  Kemp said, ‘All’s well that ends well, if you’ll forgive the cliché.’

  ‘It’s not ended yet,’ Theakston said.

  ‘You mean von Hagen?’

  ‘Aye! And him apart, there’s nowt so daft as complacency.’ Kemp felt reprimanded, and was to have cause to remember Theakston’s words.

  SIXTEENr />
  I

  Theakston brought down his glasses. He said, ‘Cape Kanin, dead ahead. And dead on my ETA. I’ll be altering course when we’re off Kiya. Plenty of time yet.’

  Kemp nodded, studying the seas ahead. The visibility was a lot better now; the snow had stopped altogether a few hours before, and for a while before that there had been nothing more than occasional flurries. The wind remained, as did the biting cold. There had been more drifting ice through which the stern of the Hardraw Falls had pushed at her painfully slow speed. All in all, Kemp thought the PQ had been the most worrying, the most frustrating convoy he had ever been with. The slow progress had been agonizing and the presence aboard of von Hagen seemed to have distorted everything away from the normal run of convoys. Not long after his conversation with Theakston, Petty Officer Napper had made another report, somewhat ostentatiously showing how dedicated he was to his duty.

  ‘That there Swile, sir.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Acting furtive, sir.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Just furtive like, sir. Talking to the others out of the corner of his mouth...looking around first.’

  ‘But without noticing you?’

  ‘Yessir. Kept meself hidden, sir. Or anyway, looking as though I was doing something else and not aware of him.’

  ‘Very cloak-and-dagger,’ Kemp said, tongue in check.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Never mind, Napper. Carry on the good work, that’s all. Have you any definite ideas yet, any clue as to what Swile might be preparing to do?’

  ‘No, sir, not yet, sir.’

  ‘Very well.’ Kemp made a dismissive gesture; Napper saluted and left the bridge. He would have liked to do some closer eavesdropping on Swile, but so far hadn’t found a way of achieving this. Swile clammed up whenever he caught a sight of the naval ratings and short of disguising himself as a ventilation shaft there was no way Napper could get up close at the right moment. Being honest, Napper didn’t see what Swile could possibly do; it was too late in the voyage, for one thing, they were coming right slap into enclosed Russian waters now, would soon have the communist land mass right around them, which was a terrifying thought in itself and never mind Swile and von Hagen. It was giving Napper the shivers: Stalin, the Man of Steel, was a real bully boy and by all accounts Russia was a joyless place at the best of times, all snow and ice and east wind and hunched-looking foodless peasants dressed in old sacks and such and fur hats — he’d seen shots on the newsreels in the Apollo cinema in Albert Road in Southsea, the posh part of Pompey, though Albert Road itself wasn’t posh — but a sight posher than bloody Russia had looked like! Napper would heave a sigh of genuine relief when he was west of the North Cape again and heading south. The Russians could keep the Hardraw Falls so long as they parted with Petty Officer Napper...which in worrying fact they just might not. You never knew with dictators, they were so filled with a sense of their own importance that they thought they could get away with anything and, possession being nine parts of the law so to speak, Stalin might go and impound all hands once they were in his net with the hammer and sickle being brandished over them.