‘Shoot me.’ Again Petersen held out his gun. ‘All you have to do is point and fire it.’
‘Don’t be a fool…’
‘Jeesus!’
Shaken by another spasm, Petersen dropped the gun to fumble at his belt. There was a sudden bang; the shot ricocheted away off a rock. Clark jumped back with shock, unfamiliar with the deficiency in the German machine gun that, once cocked, could chamber and discharge itself if the butt was struck sharply upon hard ground. He leaned forward and caught the gun as it clattered on to the frozen rock and slid towards him, intending to hand it back to Petersen, but Petersen himself was again thrusting his leather breeches down over his thighs. As he exposed himself, Clark saw his stained under-linen and caught a whiff of the stink. Petersen closed his eyes and turned away.
‘Shoot me, Jack,’ he pleaded as he evacuated himself. Clark averted his eyes.
‘What’s going on?’
Clark spun round. Twenty yards away Bootsmannsmaat Straub, Petersen’s right-hand man, stood upon a rock with his machine gun at the ready.
‘Your captain is ill, Herr Straub.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He is here, shitting.’ Clark pointed behind him.
‘I cannot see him.’
‘He is in a small hollow behind me,’ Clark explained, suddenly realising Petersen was invisible to Straub.
‘You are lying! You have shot him, you bastard!’
‘No!’ Clark swung on Petersen to find his cousin staring up at him. ‘Say something, Johannes!’
‘Shoot me, Jack! Shoot me with my arse hanging out!’ Petersen gasped.
Clark turned round again. Straub was closer and was craning his neck, trying to peer past him.
‘There!’ Clark called. ‘You heard that… He is ill…’
‘You turned your head away. You speak German – you have killed him…’
‘For God’s sake… Stand up, Johannes!’ Clark called, his eyes fixed on Straub in wild disbelief that the petty officer could think him capable of ventriloquism at such a moment! Clark’s nerves were strung taut as a bowstring. Instinctively he sensed the impending crisis inherent in the imbalance of Johannes’s mind, the conviction of the German petty officer and the tension in his misunderstanding of the situation.
Clark flung himself backwards. He would have twisted his ankle had he not fallen against Johannes who was leaning forward, one hand on the rock supporting his body, the other across his rebellious and uncontrollable belly.
As Clark rolled over, away from the faecal stench that filled his nose, he was still holding Petersen’s discarded machine gun. He was face to face with Petersen’s ordure and the stench brought him retching to his knees, just as Petersen stood up. Straub fired a short burst before realising his error and, as Johannes collapsed backwards with a cry and slumped sideways, Clark stood and shot Straub, the machine gun leaping in his hands with a life of its own.
Clark ran forward as Straub was flung backwards with a cry, dropping his own gun with a clatter. Fifty yards away a dozen men stood on the beach, watching what was going on in uncomprehending astonishment, for it had happened so quickly. Then several of them began running forward. At Clark’s feet Straub twitched then lay still. The pool of warm blood steamed as it ran out over the yellow-green of the lichen-covered rock. The stink of blood and shit rose from Straub’s body.
Clark looked up. On the left of the line coming towards him one of the men was armed. He bore the third of the machine guns rescued from the Orca.
‘Stop!’ Clark shouted in German and when they had obeyed, he lowered the muzzle of his gun and added, ‘There has been a terrible accident. You have my word on it. Bootsmannsmaat Straub thought I had killed Captain Petersen. In fact his gun went off by mistake when he was shitting…’
‘That is a lie! You are lying!’ someone shouted and the men began to move forward again.
Clark saw the flaming stutter of the gun on the left of the line. The rocks behind him exploded as the spray of bullets traversed. He dropped like a stone, ducking backwards again, hidden from his assailant. Behind him Johannes lay quite still. The butt of a Luger gleamed on his hip and Clark quickly withdrew it and shoved it into his own pocket, then he fell back into the narrow gully Petersen had been using as a latrine, his boots slithering in Petersen’s shit.
The gully was an old watercourse down which meltwater from higher up had worn a deep furrow in the hillside. Bending low, Clark retreated up it, gaining a little height until, behind the low vegetation of a patch of ground willow, he paused and looked back.
Below him was the beach. A few men, too weak to take any part in the proceedings, lay near the camp, staring anxiously to their left. He could see Storheill standing close to one of the reclining figures, whom he recognised as Carter. Harding was also on his feet close by and they were all staring at the backs of the Germans as they cautiously advanced on the rocky hump upon which the dead Straub was spreadeagled. It was clear they expected Clark to be hiding directly behind Straub, in the declivity into which the narrow watercourse dropped and where, between two confining rocks, Freggatenkapitän Johannes Petersen also lay dead.
Clark saw the slow advance, more an approach by nervous and suspicious strangers than an attack, led by one man, the machine-gunner. It was Straub’s fellow petty officer, the last one left after Straub’s death. Clark wished he could remember the man’s name, he might thereby save him, but then there were Storheill, Carter and Harding to be thought of. If only he could remove the threat of that last machine gun…
He could not have many shots left; crouching, he aimed carefully and fired. The shattering chatter of the short burst sent a crowd of auks skywards from the beach, where they had just settled after the last discharge. He could not have many shots left and now he had missed! Ducking back, he shifted his ground again. A burst of bullets fired upwards from the beach sprayed wildly over the scrub and rock, sending the whine of ricochets over his head. He climbed higher, still partially hidden from the beach, hoping to work round before dropping down again to get back to Storheill and the others. He was torn by a fury to end this ridiculous situation and get those remaining to safety, but then he heard a voice call, the echo of it eerie as it reverberated up the narrow valley.
‘Captain Clark,’ it called. ‘Come back and surrender. We have your men here as hostages.’
‘Do you hear us, Captain Clark?’ queried a second voice.
Clark sat back and stared up at the sky. It was clouding over again but he did not notice, he was desperate to know what to do and was filled with a sinking feeling of despair. This was where he must die, he thought, here in the Arctic that had captivated him as a young man…
But he could not abandon Storheill and the others. He was not finished yet! Perhaps, if he disappeared into the hinterland for a few hours, he could stalk them so that when the opportunity offered he might gain control of that last gun. There was not one of the Germans fit enough to follow him. Yes, that was the thing to do, he would simply go to ground, until they had dropped their guard; then he would return to sort the matter out and get Storheill, Carter and Harding out of the mess.
Then he heard the next shout. ‘Sir!’ It was Storheill, hailing in English. ‘They are going to shoot us. Carter and Harding are both bad and still shitting. I will die for Norway! Remember my reputation!’
‘No!’
Clark was moving now, back the way he had come, at a fast lope, unheeding of his painful feet. He knew now that he must die, like his cousin. Their fates were inextricably intermingled – Johannes, Magda, Kurt and himself – a metaphor for this useless, fruitless war, and into this familial maelstrom they had sucked the luckless Jenny and her unborn bastard. Was that what all this was about, this new life in Jenny’s uterus, utterly ignorant of all that had gone into the genetic accident of its birth?
Clark dumped these abstractions. He no longer cared. He was cannon fodder, like both his cousins. If he had escaped the indignity of diar
rhoea it was because he was being saved for a different ignominy. As he hobbled forward, he heard the staccato chatter of the gun and Storheill’s defiant cry: ‘God save Norway!’
Clark was furious: why did men have to justify their miserably futile existences by such grandiosities?
Oblivious to the pain in his feet he leaped out of the gully and began a slithering, scrambling descent down over the ice-splintered rock talus. Only a few feet below him spread the beach and he saw Storheill falling in obscene jerks as the petty officer fired relentlessly into him. Clark scrabbled down towards them firing the machine gun from his hip; the petty officer had hardly completed the destruction of Storheill when he fell himself after a ridiculous little dido in which his legs collapsed and he flopped down upon a pelvis shattered by good German bullets.
Clark slid to a standstill. The petty officer’s machine gun dropped in front of him. Clark stood over him and swung his own weapon round, emptying the magazine into the German sailors as they approached. When he had run out of ammunition, Clark bent to pick up the petty officer’s gun. When that too was emptied, he threw it aside. Then he knelt beside Storheill. The Norwegian was quite dead and Clark extended his own fingers and drew Storheill’s lids down over his staring eyes. Carter lay next to him. He had been dead for some moments, Clark thought. He looked up, seeking Harding. The man lay a few yards off; he had been cut down across the midriff, but he was still breathing. Clark drew the Luger, cocked it and knelt beside the big, Bolshie seaman. He placed the muzzle at Harding’s temple. The man must have felt something, for his eyes fluttered open for a moment.
‘I’m sorry about this, Harding, but it’s all I can do for you,’ Clark said as he pulled the trigger.
Then he rose and walked back along the beach. One by one he shot the wounded as they stared up at him, several caught by death in the act of defecation. One man had escaped the machine-gun fire and fell to his knees in a gesture of supplication.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clark said in German, and shot the sailor. He was about nineteen years old. Then Clark looked up at the sky. It was beginning to snow and he called out in a loud voice: ‘May God have mercy on me!’
When the echo of his cry had died away he was weeping. Sniffing as he went, he rescued the compass, the improvised blubber stove and a sheet of vulcanised rubber. Recovering what ammunition he could find on Petersen for the pistol, he made a bundle of it all.
Then, consulting the compass, he began walking towards the north-west.
* * *
He found the ruins of an old whaler’s hut on the southern shore of Horn Sound near what the chart called Gashamna. Here he waited for four weeks, shooting seals with the Luger and subsisting on seal steaks and salads of scurvy grass until one morning a British fleet oiler glided into the sound through the sea smoke and anchored a mile offshore. It took Clark all morning to attract the attention of the tanker, burning old oil-sodden rags to make smoke, anxious that his cigarette lighter was almost out of fuel and he might never succeed.
But at last he saw the welcome and acknowledging flash of an Aldis lamp and, an hour later, the fleet auxiliary’s motor lifeboat chugged ashore and grounded on the shingle. Clark walked down to the boat, dropping the Luger into a rockpool as he went. It fell through a thin sheet of ice. At the boat a rather nervous young third mate asked, ‘Are you British, Norwegian, Russian or German?’
‘I’m British,’ he said. ‘My name is Clark.’
They helped him aboard and he sat alongside the young officer, his face seamed by tears.
‘Were you in PQ17?’ the embarrassed young man asked, raising his voice above the noise of the engine as the motor lifeboat ran out towards the rusty grey tanker. Clark met the young man’s eyes and then he looked away. ‘You must have had a terrible time. What a mess!’
‘I don’t know much about it,’ Clark said, his voice indistinct.
‘Bloody Admiralty cocked it all up, they say,’ the young man affirmed. ‘Lots of ships lost.’
Clark shut his mouth. He was aware that he could not think straight. He would find out all about it in due course. All he wanted to do now was to sleep, and that is what, after a hot bath, they let him do aboard the oiler. He did not care that they had put an armed guard upon the door.
Epilogue
‘How did you cover your tracks?’ I asked as Clark finished his story sometime in the early afternoon of the next day.
He smiled. ‘I have tried to do that ever since,’ he said with a weary, enigmatic air, ‘and I should have succeeded, but for your book and the fallibilities of age. For most of life one tries to forget and one is very largely able to do so. But old age brings unwanted things back unsummoned; the memory plays tricks, the past seems so close you can hear it breathing. Every night I hear the pistol shots I fired as I executed all those men. Judge, jury and hangman…
‘Your generation has counselling, though what good it does, I have no idea. My generation simply remembers…’ He fell silent for a moment, and I was left thinking over what he had said until he rallied. ‘Oh, you asked how I kept the secret, didn’t you? Well, the master of the tanker was a very decent fellow. “I’ll have to report that I’ve picked you up,” he said, and I said, “Can’t you wait until we get to Scapa, or wherever you’re going?” and he said he couldn’t really, so I said that I wasn’t in PQ17. That’s when he told me what had happened and that the convoy had been scattered and then the merchant ships sunk piecemeal. I found it difficult to believe after all I had gone through, but the Admiralty weren’t to know we had succeeded in our mission, and it was clear then, as it is clear to me now, that Pound had acted on the assumption that we had failed.
‘Anyway, I told the oiler’s master that I had been involved in a secret weather mission connected with covering PQ17 and that our ship had been lost in the ice. I said that I was the only survivor and had been first lieutenant. I said I had a code word to transmit if we had problems and was anxious to send it as it should have been transmitted before we lost the ship, but the circumstances didn’t allow it. He was sympathetic, as a seaman is when another has lost his ship. Even though I think he nursed a suspicion that I was a spy, it was harmless enough. Perhaps if he’d been a regular naval officer, he might not have been so relaxed, I don’t know.’ Clark shrugged. After a little, he went on. ‘Anyway, I sent the Admiralty the single word Forbearance. It was far too late, of course, but someone picked it up and, in due course, it must have been passed to Gifford, for an armed guard was waiting for the tanker when she returned to Loch Ewe and I was taken in conditions of considerable secrecy to London.
‘I met Gifford once more and told him what had happened. He looked tired, overworked and disappointed. He told me not to make a formal Report of Proceedings and that he would pass on the information to Sir Dudley Pound. I asked if I could report to the First Sea Lord and he said, rather curtly I thought, “Certainly not!” Then he said that I was in line for promotion to commander and that I would be sent for a refresher course in anti-submarine warfare. He reminded me that the source of the intelligence that had started my wild goose chase into the Arctic remained valuable to the Allied cause and that I was to observe secrecy for the rest of my life.
‘I remember telling him, a little curtly myself by now, that he had no need to concern himself. I understood the importance of an official secret.
‘A month later I was in command of a corvette, and six months later I received a brass hat and moved into a new frigate, where I found myself senior officer of an ocean escort group. I saw the war out in the Atlantic; a grey war fought by grey men in grey ships; a desperate business.
‘D’you know I didn’t really care about things after PQ17… But you know all about the aftermath of that affair… It’s in your book.’
He sat back in his chair and dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. The story seemed to be over and I was scribbling what I thought was to be the last of my notes. It grew silent and I thought he had dozed off when
suddenly he said, ‘I forgot to tell you the cause of the diarrhoea.’ I looked up. ‘It was trichinosis, caused by a parasite called trichina spiralis. It is found in polar bears and pigs, and some seals too, I learned later. Thank God we cooked those we ate…’
‘And what brought you here?’ I asked.
‘What?’
I repeated my question, adding, ‘What happened to you and Magda, and Jenny…?’
‘Oh, I told you all that, did I?’ He sighed, then went on: ‘I sold up the big house on the Wirral after my father died in 1951…’ He sat for a moment and stared out of the window. Charlotte was pruning roses in the overgrown garden. He gave a short, dry and bitter laugh. ‘Dead roses,’ he said, ‘for a dead man talking.’
‘Did you marry Jenny?’ The question was an impertinence, blurted out before I could stop myself, but I wanted to know the end of the story – his end, not that of the official secret.
He did not seem to mind and merely shook his head. ‘No. She married an American seaman. I married Magda.’ He paused a moment after that admission and I was left to imagine how their reconciliation had come about. It would have been an impropriety to pry further. ‘We adopted the little girl; the American didn’t…’ He failed to finish the sentence and I could see no point in pursuing the detail; it was not important.
‘Magda had found this house when she had been having a fling with a Yank herself. He was an airforce colonel, East Anglia was stiff with them then. He abandoned her, of course, when he went back to his young wife and child in Connecticut. We were happy for a few years, then Magda decided to emigrate to Israel. She died of cancer about twelve years later. When my daughter lost her husband she came and joined me. She loves the house…’
He fell silent and I sensed the story had ground to its end. I remember looking down at my notes. For some reason, Storheill had fascinated me, perhaps because Clark seemed fond of him.
‘I have told you a great deal,’ Clark said, as though deciding himself that the matter had now reached its conclusion.
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