Most Secret

by Nevil Shute

  “Did you join her at the beginning of the war?”

  “No, sir. I joined her in February, 1940.” There was a momentary silence and then, as if feeling that some more explanation was required, he said: “I had quite a way to come.”

  “Where were you when it started?”

  “I was in ’Frisco, sir. I was Marine Superintendent with the Manning Stevens Line.”

  I did not know the name. “Where do they run?”

  “Down to Chile, and around. Nitrate tramps, under the Chilean flag. Five of them, there were.”

  I nodded. “Did you come back across the States?”

  He shook his head. “I hadn’t that much jack,” he said softly, smiling a little. “I worked a passage home as deck-hand on a tug.”

  He told me that the Salvage Department had been in the market for tugs all over the world, and they had bought a thing called Champion in San Francisco at the beginning of the war. She was not very big, she was twenty-three years old, and when loaded with a deck cargo of coal for the Atlantic crossing she had fourteen inches freeboard. They left San Francisco in November, 1939, bound for Liverpool.

  Her auxiliary machinery gave continuous and increasing trouble. They came by Rosario and Acapulco to the Panama Canal, and from there by way of Kingston in Jamaica to Bermuda. Here they waited for a fortnight to join a convoy. Sailing with the convoy they blew a gasket out of the condenser pump when they were three days out, and had to stop engines while they made repairs, rolling their fourteen inches freeboard under twice every twelve seconds. Six hours later they were going again and chasing on to catch the convoy up, and nine hours after that they blew the gasket out again. They turned and steamed back slowly to Bermuda to face up warped castings in the dockyard shops.

  When they were ready to start off again they were routed up to Halifax to join a convoy there. It was January by that time, and a tug with fourteen inches freeboard in the North Atlantic in mid-winter is no joke, especially for the deck-hands. They elected to try it, however, and sailed with a convoy for Liverpool as soon as they arrived. Nine days later in longitude twenty-eight west the condenser pump passed out again, this time with a broken piston. They were about six hundred miles from Ireland.

  The convoy went ahead and left them, and they followed after it thirty-six hours later. They sailed unescorted into Londonderry in the end, rested for three days, and completed the trip to Liverpool to hand the vessel over to the Salvage Department.

  “A very good show,” I remarked.

  He smiled gently. It was quite a trip,” he said. “I’m glad we made it all right.” I was coming to the conclusion that this was rather an attractive man.

  I turned again to his papers. “I see you put down here that you wanted to be employed in fighting with fire,” I said casually. “That’s rather unusual. What put that into your head?”

  He said: “Oh, that was just a fool idea I had at the beginning of the war. That doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “What sort of fool idea? I’d like to know.”

  He glanced at me curiously. “The Germans used Flammenwerfer, in the last war, an’ I think we should have done. It’s what you want to give these Nazis.”

  I said: “Have you ever seen a Flammenwerfer?”

  “I did see one once,” he said. “It seemed to be rather an unwelcome subject.”

  “Where was that?”

  “In the United States.”

  “When?” He was telling me no more than he had to.

  “About 1927, it must have been.”

  I wrinkled my forehead, trying to think of an easy way of extracting what I wanted to know. “Was that a demonstration?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “A kind of demonstration.”

  I had no time to waste in going on like that. “I want to know about that flame-thrower you saw,” I said. “How did you come to see it?”

  He seemed very reluctant. “I was in the import business,” he said at last.

  “Import business? What were you importing?” And suddenly I saw the answer to my question, and smiled. “Rum?”

  He looked confused. “Hard liquor,” he admitted. “It was mostly rye. I’d been going through a bad patch, sir,” he said.

  I grinned at him. “I don’t suppose that you’re the only ex-rum runner in the Navy,” I said cheerfully.

  “I know damn sure I’m not,” he said.

  “About this flame-thrower,” I reminded him. “Was that in a ship?”

  He said: “It was in a ship it happened. Off the coast of Massachusetts, way back in twenty-seven.”

  I nodded; he was easing up. “What ship was that?”

  He hesitated. “Heartsease,” he said. “Or … it might have been Judy. They changed her name,” he explained. “She was called Oklahoma City in the end.”

  “I see,” I said. “How did she get mixed up with flame-throwers?”

  He told me the whole incident, and it took a quarter of an hour. I didn’t cut him short, partly because I was curious, but also because I wanted to know all I could about John Colvin. And what he said was this:

  Rum-running in those days was an affair of queer, tortuous politics. In the beginning ships used to arrive in Rum Row and used to sell cases of liquor indiscriminately to the fast motor-boats that came out from the shore to them; there was never much difficulty in disposing of the cargo in this way. Presently the shore end of the trade became more organised as the small individual operators were amalgamated into powerful groups, were squeezed out and murdered, or were taken by the law officers. The repercussions of this development upon land were felt upon the sea. Sleek, Italianate gentlemen began coming out in fast armed boats and bought options on large parcels of the cargo. The old customers would come along next day and would be told that no Scotch was for sale, or else no rye; that it was all reserved. Then there would be trouble. Sometimes the two parties would meet on board and there would be a showdown, usually with a settlement to the profit of the Italians.

  Occasionally the settlement was not so amicable. Shots were exchanged in Heartsease, once in the saloon and once in a desperate running battle round about the bridge that lasted for a quarter of an hour and left the ship with a good deal of washing down to do before returning to Nassau. John Colvin disapproved of this, as did his captain, but there was nothing much that they could do to stop it.

  It was at this juncture that they had their trouble with Bugs Lehmann.

  Colvin had known Bugs Lehmann for some months. He was a German American, they thought; at any rate he spoke with a thick German accent. They were lying anchored some miles off Cape Cod at that time, and had come back to the same place for a number of successive trips. Bugs came out with half a dozen other men in a big launch; he paid cash on the nail with never any trouble. He did not buy large quantities, but he was a good, steady customer. They thought he came from one of the little harbours on the north side of the cape; his trade was almost certainly in Boston.

  It was only when it was all over that they came to know the origin of his name, Bugs. It was, they found out later, short for Firebug.

  Bugs Lehmann came on board one day just after an Italian that they knew as Mario had left. Mario had bought an option for a week on the remainder of their cargo of hard liquor, and had paid good dollars for his option. About five hundred cases were involved. When Bugs arrived in an empty launch, there were five hundred cases staring at him from the open hatches, but all they had to sell him were three barrels of Algerian red wine, an unwanted sample that they had carried with them for some months and proposed shortly to dump overboard.

  Bugs Lehmann was a very angry man. He argued for some time and was exceedingly unpleasant, but the ship’s officers were obviously armed and he had only three men with him. Presently the captain, a red-headed Ulsterman, took him down to his cabin and split a bottle of whisky with him. They were rather sorry for Bugs Lehmann in their way; there were no other ships about and it was clear to them that this option was one mo
ve in a shore battle of the gangs which would end in his elimination from the Boston trade. But there was nothing they could do to help him out.

  He went over the side to his launch after a couple of hours, sullen and silent.

  The captain stood with Colvin by the rail, watching the launch as it drew away. “That’s another of the little chaps,” he said. “We won’t see him again.”

  “I reckon Mario’s got his number,” said the mate.

  “Aye,” said the captain. “Mario’s got his number. Got his tombstone ready for him, like as not.”

  Colvin laughed. “Maybe. In any case, we deal with Mario from now on.”

  But they were not quite right in that. In the late afternoon three days later, Bugs came to them again. He came with six or seven men beside him in the launch. Colvin met them at the head of the companion ladder; the captain was in his bunk. Before Colvin realised what was happening he found himself covered by a Thompson gun.

  He was not greatly worried. He said: “Say, Bugs, you don’t have to act like this.”

  The German said: “I haf no quarrel with you, eider with the captain. You chust keep quiet, and you don’t see nodding, and you don’t say nodding. Nor de crew eider.”

  The captain came up, and was covered similarly immediately he stepped on deck. Their guns were taken from them and they were locked into the chart-house; the crew were ordered below and went very willingly.

  From the chart-house windows Colvin and his captain had a good view of the head of the companion, and could see most of what went on on deck. They saw a queer harness brought up from the launch, comprising a back pack of tanks and cylinders; there was a length of hose that terminated in a long metal pipe or nozzle. They watched as this equipment was buckled on to Bugs Lehmann by his satellites.

  “What in the name of God is all that gear?” whispered the captain. “Is it for squirting gas?”

  “I reckon it must be,” said Colvin. “Do you think it’s Mario they’re laying for?”

  “Must be Mario. I didn’t expect him till to-morrow. I wish we’d never got mixed up in this.”

  They waited for an hour, as dusk fell. Then from the mist towards the shore they heard the deep rumble of a heavy launch. “Mario,” the captain whispered.

  They watched from the chart-house, tense and apprehensive. Bugs Lehmann’s boat was evidently lying off some distance from the ship, because the new launch circled normally to the companion. They could see Bugs crouching down behind the bulwarks, uncouth in his equipment, the nozzle poking out towards the ladder.

  There was a hail from the launch. “Heartsease?”

  One of the men on deck, dim in the evening light, hailed back in a good English voice. “Heartsease it is. Watch out for our companion as you come alongside.”

  There was a pause, tense and pregnant.

  And then a horrible thing happened. A violent blast of cherry-coloured flame shot out from the long nozzle down the companion ladder, crowded with six or seven men coming up the side. They saw Bugs Lehmann rising to his feet, directing the jet of fire full on the bodies of his Italian enemies. A burst of Tommy-gun fire followed from the bulwarks down into the launch; there were hoarse, tortured screams, and a loud sighing, windy noise of flame. The fire lit up the whole ship with its light, died, and burst out again in sudden, dreadful jets, hideous, devastating, and inhuman.

  In the chart-house the two officers watched, utterly appalled. The jets of fire, full twenty yards in length, went on and on; they could not see all that was happening over the ship’s side. But in the end it stopped, and there was only the faint smoky flame of the burning companion ladder, and the blaze from the launch burning upon the water, and drifting away astern.

  Presently they were released from the chart-house by an exultant gang. “I guess you got whisky to sell me to-day?” said Bugs Lehmann grimly. “That Mario, he ain’t going to need it now, I t’ink.”

  He showed them his equipment with great pride; they examined it with horrified interest. It was a German type pack flame-thrower, and he was tremendously proud of his prowess in handling it. It seemed to mean nothing to him that he had just murdered seven or eight men horribly. Colvin got the impression from something that was said that Lehmann had served in the world war as a German Flammenwerfer soldier, and that he had built the equipment himself from the German model.

  They sold him all the liquor that he wanted, about two hundred cases. It was slung down into his launch and in an hour he was away, and they were left to cut away the burnt companion ladder and remove the scars of fire from the ship’s side before returning to the Bahamas. They sailed that night, resolved to work on the Virginia coast thenceforward and to give New England a long rest.

  A fortnight later they saw in a newspaper that the body of Bugs Lehmann had been discovered in a ditch between Chatham and Hyannis.

  Colvin told me all this, sitting in my room at the Admiralty; I was too interested to cut him short. “It was just a fool idea I had,” he said apologetically. “But it stuck in my mind these fourteen—fifteen years; the proper way to treat them Nazis. Treat ’em the way they understand. So when the admiral asked at my interview if I had any preference in my employment, I just upped and said what I thought, and it went down like that in the record. But you don’t want to pay any attention to that, sir.”

  That, of course, was my affair, not his. Before I took him into my confidence, I wanted to know one or two more things about him.

  “Are you married?” I enquired. One must give some weight to that sort of thing.

  “No, sir,” he said. He said it with just that momentary hesitation that convinced me he was lying; it was, I thought, the first lie he had told me in the interview.

  “About to be?”

  “No, sir.”

  His private life was no affair of mine, of course, and he had given me the answers that I wanted to hear. It seemed to me that I could safely leave it at that.

  “Well now,” I said, “the duty that you are proposed for is a special operation in a very small vessel. It’s something rather in the nature of a Commando operation on a very small scale. A good navigator is needed, and that’s what you’ve been recommended on. The vessel will be under the command of an army captain; if you accept the job you would be a sort of sailing master under his command. There will be one other deck officer under you, a lieutenant R.N.V.R. Most of the crew will be Free French.”

  He said quickly: “I learned some French, one time up in Quebec.” He seemed keenly interested.

  “That helps,” I said. “Does that sort of thing line up with what you want to do?”

  “And how,” he said. “I got a bellyful of ocean boarding vessels.”

  He said: “This means some close-up fighting with the Jerries, I suppose?”

  I nodded. “It’s genuine Commando stuff. There is some risk in it—in fact, a lot of risk. There always is in this short-range fighting. It’ll be practically hand-to-hand. Essentially it’s a job for volunteers.”

  “Well, I’m a volunteer for anything like that,” he said. “I guess that’s why you asked if I was married?”

  “Yes,” I said dryly. “It’s as well to know.”

  “Sure.” He thought for a moment. “Say, is that why you wanted to know all about the Flammenwerfer?”

  This was a first interview. “That’s as it may be,” I replied. “Plenty of time to talk about that later on.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I certainly would like to have a job like that.

  I thought about it for a minute or two. I liked the man quite well myself, but I wasn’t in the party. “I’m going to send you down to Dartmouth,” I said at last. “A little ship like this has got to be a happy ship; before you get this job you’ve got to meet the commanding officer, Captain Simon.” I told him how to get in touch with Simon at the port. “You’d better take the next train down.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I can work with anyone. I never get no personal trouble in a ship.” />
  That was confirmed in his record. There was one question I had forgotten to ask.

  “You are a British-born subject, are you?” I enquired.

  “Surely,” he replied. “I was born in Birkenhead.”

  Colvin went down to Dartmouth on the evening train, and got to Kingswear in the middle of the night. He reported at the Naval Centre and they fixed him up with a bed. Next morning he reported back to the Naval Centre after breakfast, and there Simon went to find him.

  McNeil had arranged the release of Simon from his coastal defence work some days before, and he had been putting in most of his time upon Geneviève; the shipyard were already working on the vessel. He had made two visits to the place at Honiton. On my part, after finishing with Colvin, I had spent the remainder of the afternoon telephoning other Admiralty departments and visiting the Second Sea Lord’s office, with the result that signals went off late that night releasing Boden and Rhodes for special duty.

  Simon met Colvin in the Naval Centre, where these two unusual men took stock of each other. Nobody had thought to tell Colvin that Simon was half French. They walked together down to the ship, and as they went Simon was asking questions about the other’s navigational experience. What he heard satisfied him; Colvin, I think, was taciturn and wary.

  They reached the quayside, and Simon indicated Geneviève. “There is the ship,” he said bluntly. “That is what you are to work in and to navigate, if you come with us in this thing.”

  Colvin was startled. “What in hell kind of a ship is that?” he asked. “A fishing-boat?”

  Simon said: “Certainly—a fishing-boat from Brittany. In that sort of a boat one can sail unquestioned anywhere upon the other side.”

  The other looked her over, noting the high bow, the steep sheer and the sloping deck, the wide beam, and the sharp-raked transom. “Sure,” he said at last. He turned and smiled at Simon. “Well, try everything once.”

  He jumped down on the bulwark from the quay, and so to the deck. In one quick tour from bow to stern he took in everything, noting the heavy timbers of the vessel, and her powerful engine. Then he turned to Simon.