by Alan Evans
Ross nodded. ‘I’ve heard rumours that Camels are killers.’
Gallagher snapped irritably, ‘Balls! You have to fly them all the time, that’s all. Far more pilots are killed by incompetence and funk than by Camels.’
Danby stood back in the shadows. Even so Smith saw a flicker of emotion pass across his face. Anger? But it was gone too soon for Smith to be certain.
He moved towards the chart table. ‘You said there was another thing?’
‘That’s right.’ Gallagher’s teeth showed in a grin. ‘I’d reckoned the tug would draw eight to ten feet and couldn’t get close to the shore, so I thought they’d have to dismantle the Camel and ferry it out a piece at a time. But it turned out they didn’t have to. There was a fishing-boat with the tug, they beached the boat stern to, ran some planks from her stern to the beach and shoved the Camel aboard. The tug took her in tow.’
Smith stood suddenly very still by the chart table. ‘A fishing-boat.’
Gallagher nodded. ‘I see you’re with me, Captain. Those boats may all look the same but there’s no two of them exactly alike. There was a rope lashing like a Turk’s head on her tiller, some new timber showing where they’d patched her side—I spent a day and a night in her on the way to Kirkko and I’d know the bastard anywhere. It was that Russian fishing-boat, the Anna.’
9—Riga
‘Boat!’
‘Hard astarboard!’ Smith saw the ship’s lifeboat as the lookout’s mouth opened to bellow the sighting. It lay right ahead and close under the bow, Audacity charging down on it at fifteen knots, a low smear of black with a flecking of white where the sea broke against it.
In seconds it would disappear under the bow but Audacity was answering to the helm, the stem swinging aside. ‘Meet her!’ The engines had slowed, he could feel that through his boots, hear the slower thumping. ‘Steady! Steer that!’ He had been just in time to save the boat; a second later and Audacity would have run it down. Did it matter? He snapped at the port side lookout, ‘Anybody aboard?’
The boat was sliding past close alongside, bouncing on Audacity’s bow-wave. Smith hardly needed the lookout’s answer, was sure he saw—
‘There’s men aboard her, sir! Maybe half a dozen!’
‘Stop her!’ The tremor of the gratings under his boots was stilled. Audacity was bound for the Gulf of Riga as fast as she could because he thought that she might, just, come up with the tug towing the Anna—and the gold—before they entered the Gulf. He did not want to stop but there were men down there on the cold, black sea. ‘Slow astern.’ He moved out of the wheelhouse on to the port wing to see better, followed the line of the lookout’s pointing finger, and nodded as he picked out the craft rocking astern, rolling in Audacity’s wake.
Ross and McLeod arrived on the bridge together, coats flapping as they dragged them on. Smith had conned the ship since leaving Kunda Bay an hour before and sent his officers below to sleep, but the stopping of the engines was as good as any alarm. He told them, ‘There’s a boat astern of us. I’ll take her alongside, port side to. Get a net over, Mr. Ross, and some good men on it. Make sure they’re on lines.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Ross dropped down the ladder. Smith watched the boat but spoke to McLeod. ‘There are some men aboard her. None of them has moved but rouse out the S.B.A. all the same.’ Audacity carried no doctor, only a Sick Berth Attendant, a trained medical orderly, a man who could lance a boil, dress a wound—or try to revive a man in the extremities of exposure.
Smith stopped Audacity so she drifted down to nudge against the boat just forward of the bridge. The men were already clinging to the nets there, the safety lines holding them but hanging slack to let them move on the net or enter the boat. Two of them dropped down. Smith watched from the wing and saw them picking their way about the boat. He could see now that there were six men in her. His own seamen were reporting now and Ross, at the side above them, passed it on to Smith. ‘Five of them frozen stiff, sir; stone dead. One still alive—just. Out cold but still breathing.’
‘Fetch them aboard.’ He saw Pearson, the S.B.A., down there with Ross, two of the hands with him, their arms filled with blankets. McLeod had returned to the bridge and Smith told him, ‘Pass the word for Fenwick.’ There was work for his sailmaker’s needle; he would need canvas and Smith would have to stop Audacity again at first light to bury the dead. But now—the last corpse was swinging up at the end of a line and the empty boat was drifting away. He must wind Audacity up to fifteen knots again. They did not have a minute to spare and they had to steer clear of Reval because Robertson had said that a guard-boat, probably an old destroyer, patrolled outside the port.
At first light they were off Reval but well out to sea. Ross had the watch but Smith turned out of his bunk, dressed in uniform for the first time in weeks and took his prayer book and Bible from the drawer of his desk. Outside in the wheelhouse Ross said, ‘They were German Navy men, sir. McLeod’s looked at all of them and he’s got their effects and notes of identities. The one we brought aboard alive is still hanging on but Pearson says it’s touch and go. McLeod is sleeping by him in a chair in case the chap wakes.’
‘Thank you.’ Smith wondered—German Navy men? He went steadily down the ladders to the deck aft of the bridge, in no hurry for this. Fenwick’s handiwork was there, five neatly stitched canvas bundles, weighted with fire-bars and resting on hatch covers. McLeod had examined all of them, men dead of exposure, and now if he was sleeping his dreams would not be pleasant. A petty officer and two seamen stood by, bare-headed, waiting to launch the bodies. Smith glanced up at Ross, who was waiting on the bridge for that sign, and the engines stopped. The less time they spent stopped, the better, but you could not simply dump men over the side like sacks. So he tucked his cap under his arm and opened the prayer book at the marker…
*
While still off Reval they saw distant smoke inshore, but no ship. Then in the late afternoon a seaplane flew low overhead. Gallagher, in the wheelhouse, squinted up at it and said, ‘A Brandenburg. Slow as hell. Used for reconnaissance.’ It circled once and then swept in low enough to see the colours of Anna Schmidt’s Line painted on the funnel, and her name on the stern. The four big boxes of simulated deck cargo must have looked real enough. The pilot and his observer flapped gloved hands in answer to the waving of the few men on deck, all of them in rough working clothes. The Brandenburg banked away, showing the underside of its big boxy floats, and headed eastward until it was only a speck in the sky astern and then was lost. No destroyer came bustling to investigate.
McLeod came to the bridge. The burly navigator looked pale and drawn. ‘That chap’s awake, sir, the one we took out of the boat. He rambled a bit and I couldn’t make any sense out of a lot of it. But’—he paused to take a breath—’him and the others came off that destroyer we fought. He shakes all the time he talks about it, goes on and on about the shelling and the fire. I gather he was in some sort of damage-control party trying to put it out, but then it blew up.’ He glanced at Smith. ‘You remember we thought we heard gunfire? That could have been her exploding. He’s not very clear about what happened after that. He just remembers being in the boat with the others. He doesn’t know yet that they’re dead.’
Smith asked, ‘Were there any other boats?’
McLeod shook his head. ‘I asked him. He didn’t seem to know but he did say she went down very quickly.’
With the belly blasted out of her, she would, and Smith doubted that there were any other boats. ‘How is he?’
McLeod pulled a face. ‘Not good. Shock. Some burns. Nearly frozen.’ He glanced aft and spotted the steward, Wilberforce. ‘I didn’t feel like any breakfast. Wonder if I can get a bacon sandwich?’
Examining frozen corpses was not good for the appetite but that was past now. Smith told him, ‘Try your hand.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ McLeod went hungrily away.
As far as the Anna was concerned, Smith could make a fair guess now at the s
uccession of events. The tug was the one mentioned by Robertson, the one that carried out the inshore patrol of the Estonian and Russian coasts. She must have stopped the Anna and taken her prisoner not long before Audacity appeared in those waters, searching for her. Not long before, but long enough to have received the signal ordering her to Kunda Bay to pick up the Camel, and to be on her way there and out of sight when Audacity arrived. Smith paced across the bridge and turned abruptly: he’d missed the Anna by mere hours, possibly minutes.
They’d run into the destroyer, and wrongly believed she’d got away and would give the alarm. Clearly Audacity’s identity had still been a secret—if the destroyer had sent a signal and alerted the enemy to her presence then the tug would not have sailed from Kunda unescorted. If Smith had known all this then once he’d abandoned all thoughts of recovering the gold he need not have captured the Königsberg or sent Gallagher seeking the Camel. He could have taken Audacity quietly home as she had come, a ‘neutral’.
But it was a waste of time to speculate on what might have been. The plot to sink the Russian Fleet was dead, he had needlessly taken Königsberg, and now Audacity would be hunted. But at least the ‘cargo’ was still hidden aboard the Anna. Of that he was certain. If the crew of the German tug had found that pile of gold they would not have dawdled at Kunda nor made the long voyage to Riga. They’d have taken it straight to Reval.
McLeod, sandwich in hand, clattered down the ladder from the flying bridge and entered the wheelhouse. ‘Odensholm bears 190 degrees and we’ll be opening Moon Sound in a minute, sir.’
Smith nodded. What of Elizabeth Ramsay? Was she aboard the tug? And—he suddenly remembered guiltily—what of the Russians? Then he was honest with himself: he didn’t give a damn about them, bearded strangers seen vaguely in the night. He cared about Elizabeth Ramsay. He guessed that she and the others would indeed be prisoners aboard the tug because it would be easier for their German captors to keep an eye on them there and feed them. If they were locked below deck in the Anna there was always a chance they might break out and cut the tow.
If, of course, there were any prisoners. Gallagher had seen none. They might all be dead.
‘Smoke bearing red seven-oh!’
McLeod came quickly out of the wheelhouse, followed Smith to the port wing and they stared out through glasses. That was all it was, smoke, the sign of some ship hidden below the horizon. It could be the tug. It could be anything.
McLeod said, ‘That’s Moon Sound, sir.’
Smith turned and went back to the wheelhouse. He studied the chart. The port of Riga lay at the bottom, on the southern end of the Gulf of Riga. Audacity was on course for the Irbensky Strait, the main entrance to the Gulf and still some hundred-odd miles south. Moon Sound was another way in for vessels of shallow draught; ordinarily a tug would make the passage easily. But Robertson had said that Moon Sound was blocked by Russian mines which the Germans had not swept.
Had they swept it now?
If so, then the smoke could be from the tug heading into the Gulf by way of Moon Sound. That would be easy to find out, simply by altering course to close the smoke so the ship, now hull-down beyond the horizon, would be in sight within the half-hour.
But if it was not the tug then another thirty minutes would have been lost before Audacity was back on course, and the tug ahead of them would have increased its lead by eight miles or more.
If it was ahead of them? If it was bound for Riga? Smith was taking the word of an ill-educated local peasant as reported by Gallagher. But Gallagher had been sure, and it did make sense for the Camel to be taken to the German Air Force workshops at Riga.
Smith was painfully aware that he had transferred the gold too soon, missed catching the Anna, taken the Königsberg when he need not, and missed the tug and the gold when they lay under his hand in Kunda Bay the night he put Gallagher ashore. A succession of disastrous errors.
If he did not change course and that was the tug steaming into Moon Sound then he would lose her, the gold, the Camel, Elizabeth Ramsay. And perhaps Audacity, too?
Behind him Ross leaned in the doorway, silently rubbing at his long jaw. He and McLeod both watched Smith. This was not their decision to make, but it could still kill them.
Robertson had been right about the destroyer patrols and the tug so it was odds-on that he was right about the mines laid in Moon Sound. After all, the Germans were fighting a war on the Western Front and in the North Sea, and were now involved in Finland. Why should they use precious ships and men, needed elsewhere, to sweep a passage through Moon Sound; a passage they did not want? They had good reason to leave well alone. As it was, they only had to guard one door to the Gulf of Riga: the Irbensky Strait.
Smith made his decision: ‘Keep her as she is.’ Then he went to his cabin and threw over his shoulder, ‘Call me when the watch changes.’ He shut the door between him and the rest of them.
And told himself that was another mistake. He needed to be out in the air and on the move but instead he was cooped up in this cabin like a cell. Because he wanted to appear calm, unworried, confident. Why bother? They all knew he desperately wanted the tug, the fishing-boat, the Camel—and the ‘cargo’. Just as they knew what that ‘cargo’ was. He was a posturing fool and was now paying the penalty.
Smith lay on his bunk and, when they called him at the end of the watch, pretended he had been asleep. He passed a few restless minutes in the wheelhouse but there was nothing in sight but the long finger of Cape Ristna to port. That ran out from Dago Island, one of the two big islands closing the northern end of the Gulf of Riga.
He returned to his cabin, sat at the table and tried unsuccessfully to read. Worry and ill-temper mounted inside him, his mind chewing at all the possibilities, trying to plan a course of action for each of them but knowing there was the unforeseen always waiting. The crew of the four-inch, in their mess right abaft and below his cabin, were singing. It got on his nerves. He only had to speak a word to McLeod outside to stop it. He was the captain and could do what he liked, couldn’t he? No, he couldn’t. The song finished in a burst of laughter: it was a good sign that they were cheerful. Now came a touch of sentiment: ‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding…’
There was; they were on it and not knowing where it would end.
He thought, David Cochrane Smith, part-time philosopher. That was when he laughed at himself and he was grinning as McLeod rapped at the door and put his head around it. ‘Smoke ahead, sir. Port lookout just spotted it.’
The lookout had bellowed the information from the wing of the bridge but Smith had not heard him through the singing and his preoccupation. ‘I’ll come.’
McLeod looked mystified by his captain’s good humour as Smith followed him out through the wheelhouse on to the bridge. An overcast day but no fog. He used his glasses, picked up the smoke and saw the black speck under it. Impossible yet to make out what ship it was, but soon… McLeod said, ‘We’re overhauling her fast.’
They were. Smith knew that if it was the tug, with the Anna in tow, then Audacity would be making almost twice her speed. Ross was on the bridge now, Gallagher right forward in the eyes of the ship, Danby below on the deck.
Ross said, ‘That must be her, sir. Two vessels in close line ahead. One of ‘em must be in tow. They’ve altered course to port now and you can see ‘em.’
Smith saw two specks, one astern of the other. Presumably their course alteration was to enter the Irbensky Strait, the entrance to the Gulf of Riga.
And Robertson had said there was a guard-boat, a destroyer, anchored in the Irbensky Strait.
*
The wind froze Gallagher’s face as the ship punched into it at fifteen knots. Could this be spring? He remembered Paris in the spring, when the Fokkers were annihilating the squadrons and he and Johnny Vincent were the only survivors of theirs at the end of one bad, black week. They’d been sent on four days’ leave to Paris, got drunk on the train, and had stayed drunk or at least half-dr
unk, anaesthetised, until they went back to the squadron, one now full of the fresh, new faces of the replacements. Gallagher thought of those four days now, the brandy Johnny’d put away. The brandy they’d both put away. He hunched down into his jacket.
Was that his Camel ahead? It was freezing cold up here at the sharp end. Johnny Vincent. His eyes watered so he turned his face from the wind and saw the small figure standing on the deck below the bridge. Bloody Danby.
*
Audacity turned to enter the buoyed channel that wound between the shallows on either side of the Irbensky Strait and Smith called his officers to him. ‘Robertson told me there was a guard-boat in the Strait and I expect he was right. After Königsberg being taken, only twenty-four hours ago and less than three hundred miles away, that guard-boat will probably stop us. We have to assume she will. She may accept us as the Anna Schmidt carrying timber, but if she does then that identity will be linked to any action we take in the Gulf and that disguise will be useless to us afterwards.’ He paused, then finished: ‘Unless we deal with the guard-boat.’
McLeod chewed his lip, thinking about that ‘deal with’. Ross asked, ‘Suppose we knocked down the boxes and went in as another ship? Say the Friedrich Wilhelm?’
Smith shook his head. ‘They’ll know by now that Königsberg was captured by a three-island tramp so they’ll not let one near them, hang what name on it you like. A timber ship is something else. I think as the Anna Schmidt we can get a lot closer to the guard-boat before they start shooting.’
Closer. Shooting. Ross and McLeod stood silent, imaginations at work. Smith went on, ‘Mr. Ross, you’ll want a boarding-party and you’ll lead it yourself. I suggest a dozen men, active and quick. I want two good men with Lewis guns in the bow of this ship. Now…’
As they listened to him the sun was slipping down towards the western skyline and the coast that lay some eight miles distant. To port but out of sight beyond the horizon lay the long point stretching out from the island of Saaremaa. Audacity crept in through the Irbensky Strait, ahead of her the bottle-neck between the shoals, a mile-wide channel—and the guard-boat that held it. Beyond lay the Gulf of Riga.