Nick of Time

by Ted Bell

  Von Krieg had the pale blue envelope from the Ministry in his hands. He was staring at Hobbes the way he’d done in the wardroom when they’d first met. He could again feel the man trying to place him. Had they met? Was it possible? Where?

  “Guten morgen, Angus,” said Little Willy. “Good morning! How did you sleep? Well, I hope. We’ve got a busy morning planned for you. We’re currently about twenty miles north-northwest of Greybeard Island, running at flank speed. Kapitän von Krieg has decided to consider your kind offer of assistance, if, of course, you also convince him you’re telling the truth.” Willy’s eyes bored into Hobbes’s own. And so, he noticed, did the red-rimmed eyes of the tired-looking submarine captain. A rummy, Hobbes thought, part of his problem, an angry drunk.

  In that instant Hobbes understood why von Krieg had been looking at him so strangely. Because he himself now remembered who this German captain was! No wonder the man had looked so familiar! The name jumped into the forefront of his brain with dreadful clarity.

  Wolfie.

  Of course! How could he have been so thick! Wolfie, the tall, arrogant German aristocrat who’d been the short-lived bane of the then-young Oxford fencing master. Hobbes remembered it all now, the angry fights over the prettiest girls, the carousing, the pub brawls at all hours when Hobbes would have to go and drag the boy by his heels from under a pile of shouting, brawling students.

  And, of course, the infamous severed ear of the Magdalen Don that finally resulted in Wolfie’s unceremonious dismissal from the college and return to the Fatherland. Hobbes had been the one with the unpleasant task of telling Wolfie he’d been sent packing back to Germany.

  “Versuch?” the captain now said to Willy, holding up the blue Ministry letter. “Proof? This one letter is proof of the Englishman’s foolish story?”

  Hobbes nodded and turned to Willy for support, but the cagey SS man simply smiled and let him hang there. Wolfie, his arms folded across his broad chest, was still staring at him. Did von Krieg remember Hobbes, too? If he did, the game was up, it was as simple as that. He felt a trickle of perspiration make its way from under his arm and realized that perhaps it was warmer in the wardroom than he’d first imagined. He tried to gaze mildly at the captain, to give away nothing in his eyes. To get Katie and himself out of this alive, he had to remain cool, no matter what. If Wolfie recognized him, he was dead. They both were. He’d lived a full life and had no fear of dying. But the child? It was unthinkable.

  “That is the letter I told you about,mein Kapitän, ” Willy said. “I’ll leave it to you to judge its authenticity.”The captain, his eyes never leaving Hobbes, pulled the letter from its envelope, raised it to his bloodshot eyes, and began to read. Hobbes, his pulse racing, waited for his fate to be determined. He felt a shudder go through the hull of the submarine; or perhaps it was just the hull of his heart.

  “Notice the gold Ministry seal and the London postmark, mein Kapitän. Is the letter not everything I promised?” Willy asked, a smirk he could not hide in his voice. “‘Activities outside the scope of his duties’! In other words, spying! Amusing, isn’t it? His own government doesn’t want him spying for Churchill anymore than we do! He’s our Greybeard spy all right!”

  “Ach! Only if all zoze things in life are as they seem,mein Colonel,” the captain replied. “But, perhaps he is telling the truth. If so, he just may be useful,ja, that’s true.”

  The captain folded the letter, stuck it back in its envelope and nodded to Willy, silently admitting that the letter was acceptable proof of Hobbes’s story. He then looked at Hobbes, those narrow-beamed eyes searching his face again.

  “But now, Englishman,” the captain said, “you must whet my appetite with more information. I’ll decide if it’s significant enough to bother with keeping you and your daughter alive.”

  “Oh, it’s significant all right, Captain,” Hobbes said, mentally breathing a huge sigh of relief. He was still in the game. And it was time to turn up the heat. “Have you fellows by chance ever heard of a man named Richard Hawke?” he asked, a disingenuous smile on his face.

  Willy stopped his pacing and almost fell over backward. The captain coughed into his fist and muttered, “I may have heard dis name before. It’s possible.”

  “I should think so,” Hobbes replied coolly. “Those two goons you sent over to sink my boat told me you spend every waking moment staring at his castle through your periscope.” He was gratified to see the captain’s jaw drop.

  “They told you that?” Wolfie exploded. “They—the ‘Tweedle Twins,’ those idiots! I’ll have them shot! I’ll have them tortured and shot! I’ll—”

  “Tweedle Twins?” Hobbes asked, confused and amused at the same time.

  “Yes, yes, that’s what das Kapitän calls Dr. Moeller and Klaus, my two little Gestapo agents. The Tweedles, ‘Dee’ and ‘Dum.’ It fits, doesn’t it?” Willy took another deep sip of his steaming coffee. He seemed to be positively enjoying himself.

  “Ah, yes,” Hobbes said, with a twinkle in his eye. “But which one of them is ‘Dum’?”

  “Why,both of them, Angus!” Willy said, exploding with laughter and a spray of hot coffee across the table.

  “So, you have heard of Lord Richard Hawke, Captain?” Hobbes said pleasantly.

  “Yes, yes, yes, of course I have heard of him!” Wolfie said. “Now what about him? Besides the fact that der Führer wants him dead?”

  “I work for him,” Hobbes said, his eyes shining, for this was his favorite part of the game. Spinning the web. “Hawke controls a vast number of English spy rings operating in this part of the world—in France, for instance and Spain. Greybeard’s is only one of the smallest cells. I am its ringleader, but I am also Hawke’s personal courier. You must have wondered how a simple lighthouse keeper could afford such an elegant craft as Thor?”

  “We planned to ask you about that, if you lived long enough,” Willy said.

  “She belongs to Hawke, Lieutenant,” Hobbes said with a smile. “Lord Hawke he is, and he has more money than sense, if you ask me. Have you ever known titled people like that? At any rate, I use his boat to ferry information around the Channel. I was on just such a mission tonight, planning to report a couple of Luftwaffe squadrons we’d recently observed patrolling off the coast of Jersey. Messerschmitt 109s escorting Junkers Su 390 heavy bombers.”

  Willy nodded and looked at Hobbes thoughtfully. “He’s correct,mein Kapitän. Last week, I heard Air Marshal Göring mention just such a Luftwaffe mission to Hitler in the Reichstag staff meeting.”

  Hobbes sat back and waited for all this to sink in. The crisis was passing perhaps, but certainly not the danger.

  “This Hawke you speak of, Angus,” Willy said. “Does he trust you?”

  “As much as he trusts anyone allowed inside his secret base, Lieutenant.”

  “Colonel! I am Colonel Steiner! How many times must I remind you?”

  “Sorry, Colonel Steiner.”

  “Secret base! What secret base?” said an excited Willy, pushing his perpetually steamy round glasses up on his nose. Willy could hardly believe his luck. The man could be a goldmine of priceless information! Even the captain would now have to admit his instincts had been correct.

  “Why, Hawke’s lair, of course,” said Hobbes. “Surely you’ve heard of it! The secret submarine base at Hawke Castle?”

  “So Hawke Castle is the base!” von Krieg said, pulling out one of his charts. “Just as I thought! Congratulations, Willy, it seems we’re about to crack Berlin’s most urgent assignment after all! We’ll be famous, I tell you, famous.”

  “I’ll want names, naturally, everyone, everyone!” Willy said, actually licking his fleshy lips like a man sitting down to a gourmet feast. “Are you still prepared to do that, Angus? Betray countrymen, betray your many comrades?”

  “Pay me enough money, Colonel, and I shall introduce you personally to every spy on Greybeard Island! Including Lord Richard Hawke himself! Because I plan to sail your lov
ely submarine right up to Lord Hawke’s bloody front door and invite you and the lads inside for a cup of tea with England’s most notorious spy himself.”

  “Wunderbar! Wunderbar! ” Willy shouted, dancing around the wardroom table, expelling clouds of purple smoke.

  “We go see then, Willy,” the captain said, leaning back in his chair with a smile. “We go and see if the Englischer lighthouse keeper is telling the truth. If he can get Der Wolf inside this Hawke’s lair. If not, well, that will be too bad. For both you…and your lovely daughter!”

  “I’ll get you inside, all right, Captain,” Hobbes said quietly. “Don’t you worry about that. Just set your course for Hawke Lagoon!”

  CHAPTER XXX

  In the Sick Bay

  · 3 October 1805 ·

  H. M. S. MERLIN, AT SEA

  Who are you?” Nick asked one of the faces floating hazily just above his own. There was a glow of flickering light swinging to and fro above him, and faces were swimming in and out of it, in and out of the heavy gloom.

  “He’s the ship’s surgeon, Nick,” said yet another face floating into the light. “You’re alive, Nick, I knew it, for all love!” This face he thought he recognized. Yes, of course, it was Lord Hawke. But who was Lord Hawke?

  “Keep still lad, lay back and rest,” the Lord Hawke face seemed to say. “Don’t talk now.” Talk? About what? All he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep forever. His head hurt him something awful, and he couldn’t remember why.

  “Where am I?” Nick asked, and felt a terrible bolt of pain in his temple. He groaned and tried to sit up. Then he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder and felt it gently press him back against the pillow. He closed his eyes. Above him in the gloom was that strangely bright, swinging light, and it hurt his eyes terribly.

  “You’re in the Merlin’s sick bay, Nick,” Lord Hawke whispered quietly. “You’ve been asleep for some time. We weren’t at all sure when you’d wake up.” Nick saw that his face broke into a broad smile. “Or even if you’d wake up.”

  Lord Hawke saw Nick squinting in pain at the light, and he took the ship’s lantern hanging above the boy’s berth and placed it on the deck, dimming the already soft glow in the sick bay. Most of the wounded men were sleeping, as it was the middle of the night. The only sound was the soft moaning of one sailor who’d finally lost his right leg to the bone saw only an hour before. The surgeon had given the man a large dollop of monkey’s blood and a leather bit to clench in his teeth when the pain became unbearable, but it hadn’t helped much.

  Hawke was glad Nick hadn’t been awake to hear the sounds of the poor sailor going under knife and saw, or his pitiful wails when his stump was plunged into boiling pitch to seal the wound and stop the bleeding. Hawke himself could barely stand it, but at that point, mercifully for all concerned, the sailor had fainted. There were one or two other sailors here in the sick bay, men who probably wouldn’t live to see the sunrise. But everything that could be done to ease their pain had been done.

  “Are we safe?” Nick asked, although he wasn’t sure why. Something about cannonballs buzzing by his ears and splintered timber crashing down from above. And Stiles, yes, his poor friend Stiles who’d been with him in the rigging when the whistling balls had started flying. The memories started returning and Nick choked back his feelings. Stiles was dead. Blown out of the rigging into a watery grave. A hero’s death, at least, Nick tried to console himself, the pain in his heart far more acute than the wound to his head. “Safe at last, sir?” Nick asked.

  “Aye, we’re safe all right, lad,” said the whispering voice of the surgeon. “Which is in no small part thanks to yerself, boy, thanks to yerself.” The elderly ship’s physician reached over and patted Nick’s hand, which had lain motionless upon his chest since they’d carried him down here many hours earlier.

  “What happened, sir?” Nick asked, his voice painfully weak. And, quietly, Lord Hawke told him.

  The Merlin had ghosted northward behind the great rock just moments after Nick had been injured. To the great relief of the crew, the shadow of the towering rock fell across the Merlin’s decks and the hands looked at each other in amazement. They’d done it! Thanks to the heroic boy at the mast-head, they had navigated the reef and were safely behind the rock!

  Suddenly, a great roaring cheer had gone up from the hands, all lifting their eyes skyward to the small boy hanging by his heels high in the rigging. He’d done it! He’d seen them through! Even the crews out in the four jolly boats were on their feet, whooping for joy and throwing their hats into the air for the brave lad at the foretop masthead.

  But when the boy didn’t respond to their wild cheers, but just hung there limply, twisting in the wind, Hawke instantly knew something was dreadfully wrong. He’d grabbed the nearest shroud and started up. In a trice, four or five hands also shot up the shrouds nearest the foremast and they had all reached the gravely wounded and unconscious boy in seconds. The first thing they noticed was the dark blood matting his curly yellow hair. It was a head wound.

  It didn’t look good. Hawke had seen battlefield wounds as bad as this. And they’d been fatal.

  They had handed Nick gently, unconscious and bleeding profusely from the head, from the uppermost crosstrees down to the deck. The sailors handled his limp form with great respect, even awe. Hawke’s heart swelled with pride. After all, to the ship’s company, Nick was only a twelve-year-old stowaway. Yet he had saved them all from the specter of death and certain defeat, that they might fight another day.

  One of the men removed the bandanna from his own head and wound it around Nick’s to staunch the bleeding. Hawke was touched at the reverence even the lowliest hand bestowed on poor Nick as he lay motionless on the sun-bleached deck. Some removed their hats and bowed their heads, praying, or more likely, paying their last respects.

  Gunner had knelt on the deck beside the boy, cradling Nick’s head in his arms and wondering if his young friend was even aware that he was dying a hero’s death. He’d always yearned to be a hero. It was the only thing he’d ever wanted, far as Gunner knew. And now …

  “You can’t die yet, boy, you just can’t!” Gunner whispered, and lifted Nick gently in his arms and cradled him to his chest. Then, his eyes brimming with tears, Gunner had sadly carried Nick below.

  And now in the sickly light of the lanterns of the sick bay, they heard the doctor’s first happy words.

  “You’re a right lucky one, Nicholas McIver,” the old surgeon said. “Hardheaded, too, you are! Lots of blood with head wounds, and yours was a sharp blow to the side of your temple. Stitched it with catgut so you’ll have a nice piratical scar, lad. One as charms the gentle sex. Now, had you been looking up and seen the blow comin’, well—”

  The room fell into an awful stillness. Death was still hovering in the gloom and even the sleeping must have felt it. Just then, a cheerful voice full of life broke the silence.

  “Oh, he’s a lucky Jack all right!” said a familiar voice in the bunk right next to Nick’s. “As lucky as they makes ’em! Bone-headed, but a right fine navigator, too!” Nick turned his head to see who it might be, a smile already breaking across his face.

  Lieutenant Stiles!

  Nick rolled on his side and stared in disbelief at the heavily bandaged figure lying in the next berth. His heart leapt for joy.

  “Why, Mr. Stiles, I thought you were—I mean, I reckoned you had been—” Nick stammered at the miracle of seeing his friend still alive and seemingly healthy. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, Lieutenant.”

  Nick sobbed, and realized that hot tears of relief were pouring down his cheeks and that he didn’t care who saw it. Some tears, he guessed, were justifiable.

  “It was a close article for me, too, Nick,” Stiles said, and smiled up at Lord Hawke. “I was blowed right into the boiling sea! But for your friend here, me dear old mum would’ve been reading me name in the black-border lists in Hyde Park. Aye, I was lucky to have an angel such as Lord Hawke to l
ook out for me. Why, Nick, you should have seen it! The great Hawke flew down from the barky’s rail and delivered me up from the sea, just like Gabriel himself! Swam through a hail of lead to save me, he did, too!”

  Now, in the gloom and sour air of the sick bay, the young lieutenant stretched his hand across the narrow space between his bunk and Nick’s. Nick extended his hand across to Stiles, and felt the bond formed by that grip was strong enough to last an eternity.

  “What’s that noise, Lieutenant?” Nick asked Stiles. His senses were coming back into focus now and he was aware of a swishing noise just outside the hull at the head of his berth.

  “That be seawater, lad,” Stiles said. “Rushin’ by the barky’s sides. We’re on the wind and sailing hard nor’east for England. See how she heels? The wind is fresh on her starb’rd beam and we’ve got our lee rail down. We must be making seven knots! Hear that bangin’ and sawin’ forward? Ships’ carpenters fixin’ those holes in her starboard bows now that we got her leaned over to port. Without such chance to get her heeled and patched, why, we’d be on the bottom by now! As it is, we’ll be good as new afore daybreak!”

  For the first time, Nick noticed the angle of the sick bay and the way all the lanterns were hanging. They were indeed heeled well over and making good speed. They’d made good their escape after all!

  “Where’s Gunner?” Nick asked, weakly. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine, son, asleep in a hammock they strung for him on the gundeck where he could be near his guns and his lads,” said Lord Hawke. “He’s been down here watching you, too. He was convinced you’d wake up eventually, and, thank the saints, he was right.”