No one moved, but for the Sofia herself.
The rain had strengthened, and thrashed against the glass.
“Madre de Dios,” Medina whispered, his eyes huge above the black beard.
“Captain, sir!” It was a voice from a room along the shadowed corridor. Michael recognized a Russian accent. “We’re receiving a radio message!”
No one stopped Michael when he followed the captain, Kpanga and Medina back to the small radio room. The Russian-born radioman, a sallow long-jawed drink of brine, had his earphones resting around his neck and was tuning the dials on a slab of a radio with louvers in it that displayed the red heartbeat of its tubes.
Over a noise of static and tones that sounded like a half-drunk Scotsman playing a bagpipe as a scorched cat howled along, a firm and clipped voice from the radio’s speaker said, “Repeat: this is the German vessel Javelin, to the Norwegian freighter Sofia. Captain Manson Konnig requests you to follow his instruction. Stop engines and prepare to be boarded. Repeat: stop engines and prepare to be boarded.”
Then the static and tones increased in tumultuous noise and the radioman had to dial down the volume.
“Still jamming us,” he told Beauchene. “We can’t get anything out, sir.”
“Merde!” The captain smacked his fist into the palm of his other hand. “Merde! Merde! You can’t break it?”
“No, sir.”
Beauchene shot a glance of disgust at Michael. “You see what you’ve done? We can’t even send an SOS! We’re helpless out here!”
“Tell me about their ship.” Michael was addressing Enam Kpanga. “When did you first spot it?”
“Just after sundown. Through the binoculars it looks only like another merchant. Maybe one hundred and thirty meters in length. Wheelhouse toward the bow. Normal running lights. Two masts strung with cargo netting. The ship is riding high, so it’s not loaded down. It’s even been flying a Norwegian flag. We tried to hail it by radio and got no reply. Very strange, that was. It held its position for awhile off the portside stern, and then it picked up speed. We saw it drop the flag of Norway and raise a German banner. Right after that the jamming started.”
“Can you determine its speed?”
Kpanga adjusted his glasses. Was his hand trembling just a little bit? It was hard to tell. “If you’re asking if Javelin is faster than Sofia, I would say definitely yes. It caught up very quickly. We can make top speed of seven knots—”
“Eight,” the captain interrupted with a sneer. “Shows how little you know!”
“I’d say Javelin can make sixteen,” Kpanga said to Michael, his face as impassive as stone.
In layman’s terms, Michael thought, the German ship could run rings around this piece of wallowing wreckage.
The static and droning tones on the radio ebbed though they did not go away. The Russian dialed up the volume. A clipped voice said, “German vessel Javelin to Norwegian freighter Sofia. Captain Konnig has generously given you thirty minutes to comply with our request. Repeat: you have thirty minutes to comply with our request or severe action shall be taken.”
The jamming increased in volume once more, and again the Russian turned down the racket to spare everyone’s ears.
“Do you have guns aboard?” Michael asked anyone who could answer.
“Some in the storeroom,” Medina said. He looked pale and stunned. “Four or five rifles. A pistol or two. Mutiny insurance. Ammunition for everything.” He shook his head, defeated. “I don’t know.”
“Any machine guns?”
“I’ve got a Thompson in my quarters.” Beauchene motioned toward another closed door across the way. “I like to have my mutiny insurance under my bunk.”
“Good. You’re going to need it, I think.”
Beauchene’s eyes narrowed. “What’s your name? Gallatin, you said? Well, Monsieur Gallatin, you’re going to pay for this when we get out of it. Believe me. Monsieur Medina, order engines full ahead. And change course, thirty degrees to starboard. After ten minutes, change course…oh….make it eight degrees to port. Set up a zigzag every ten minutes afterward, but keep that damned ship in our wake.” The Spaniard was slow in responding. “Move today!” the captain growled.
Medina stumbled toward the helm and the engine order telegraph.
“Captain?” Kpanga asked. “Do you want me to—”
“I want you to shut your black hole,” came the reply. “Gallatin, let me get my Tommy and then you’re coming with me. We’re going to find some men who can handle firearms. Then I want to be introduced to this good German shit who’s put all our necks on the fucking guillotine.”
Six
Freighter Trash
For all his sourness and bluster, Gustave Beauchene was masterful at managing his crew. Michael stood at the back of the mess hall as the captain addressed his men in no-nonsense terms. Beauchene spelled it all out. German weapons expert and family on board. Trying to get to England. A German ship with probably a Nazi captain now just a few hundred meters away, and the threat of violence to come. And not just the threat of violence, but the probability that the Sofia and her crew would be destroyed even if they bowed down and handed Herr Wesshauser over to the swastika swine.
“No one asked for this,” Beauchene told them as he walked back and forth, a little Napoleon in a dirty shirt and a yellow rainslicker with his hands on his hips. “You’re not being paid any more for it.” Michael watched him cast his hard-eyed gaze across his audience: the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Poles, the Spaniards, the French, the Dutch, the young Brit Billy Bowers and Dylan Custis the necklace-festooned Jamaican. Even the dull-witted Olaf Thorgrimsen was paying rapt attention like an Oxford student on exams day.
“You’re working men, not fighting men,” said the captain. “Well, some of you are. Working men, I mean. We’re here and there’s not much we can do about it.”
“We can get on the lifeboats and get away!” one of the Norwegians said. “Get off the ship! Can’t we?”
“And leave this beautiful bitch?” asked Beauchene, which brought a few harsh barks and bells of nervous laughter. “Oh, you could do that, very well. Certainement! But did you ever see the lifeboat that could stop a bullet? At least here you’ve got some steel to hide behind. Rotten steel, but there you have it.” He paced back and forth again. “Did you men know I used to be a baker? That’s right. A fucking honest-to-God baker. In the City of Light. My family business. Yes, laugh if you want to and I’ll cut your nuts off. I’m talking to you. In the blue shirt. What’s your job? Cock stretcher?” He turned his attention away from the giggling fool. “A baker,” he went on. “Throw everything into the mix, knead it, beat it, do whatever you want to do. Pray over the fucking thing. But nothing is ready until it passes through the fire.” He nodded, scanning their faces. “Gentlemen, whether we like it or not…we’re going to pass through some fire, very soon. I hope we won’t. But I know we will. Those Nazis…they don’t quit, they don’t give up. They’re not going to let a shipful of freighter trash stop them. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen, but when it starts…no one will blame the man who goes to his bunk. Hear that? I said it.” He swelled his chest out a little. Then he motioned toward the five bolt-action rifles and the two revolvers that lay on the table before him, along with boxes of ammunition. His Thompson submachine gun—the ‘Tommy gun’—was propped up in a corner. “We may have some univited guests. I need seven men who won’t go to their bunks. Seven men who can handle a weapon. And not just their own, with five-fingered Mary. Any takers?”
Michael watched. He had Medina’s revolver tucked in his waistband.
No one moved for a moment. Then a tall Norwegian with a tattoo on the back of his neck stood up and took one of the rifles. “Stand over there,” the captain told him.
Two more men, one Dutch and the other a Swede, took rifles. Billy Bowers stood up and chose one of the pistols. Olaf Thorgrimsen took the second pistol. A Spaniard picked up a rifle. Then the last rifle went to another Norwegian,
a squat burly man with thick black eyebrows.
“Load up,” Beauchene told them. “Get out on the deck. Choose your positions and keep watch. Don’t shoot yourselves.”
As the men left the mess hall, the brown-haired and gray-eyed Billy Bowers glanced at Michael, his fellow Brit, and acknowledged him with a lift of the chin.
“That’s all. If you’ve got work to do, get to it. Breakfast is up in two hours.” Beauchene retrieved his Thompson and motioned Michael to follow.
They went to Wesshauser’s door. Beauchene slammed on it with the butt of his submachine gun. A noise to rouse the dead.
“My God! My God! What is it?” asked the gaunt, pallid man who peered out the door and fumbled with his eyeglasses.
“Your cruise is over, pussy,” said the captain.
Beauchene pushed in and Michael followed, feeling very ungentlemanly. He averted his gaze from Annaleisa Wesshauser, a striking-looking woman in her early forties with curly blonde hair and the aquamarine eyes of her daughter, as she sat in bed and tied her lavender-colored gown up to the throat.
“What’s this about?” Red swirls had surfaced on Paul Wesshauser’s cheeks. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of gray pajama bottoms. Behind his glasses his eyes were very dark and very angry. He had a thatch of brown hair that stuck up in spikes from its encounter with the pillow. If he was any thinner he would have fit through one of the cracks in the walls. But Michael was sure that a man desperately hiding himself and his family from the Nazis for several weeks before this trip could be arranged did lose some of his appetite for strudel.
“This is your Jesus,” Beauchane told the couple, motioning with a thumb toward Michael. “Praise him.”
Paul and Annaleisa looked at each other as if they’d been awakened to a nautical nuthouse.
“My name is Michael Gallatin,” said the man from London. “British Secret Service. I was sent to make sure your trip was…”
“Unexciting,” Beauchane supplied, as he sat down on a floral-printed chair with his submachine gun across his knees.
“Unopposed,” Michael corrected. “And unfortunately, that no longer is the case.”
“Momma?” It was Emil, coming in sleepy-eyed and with touselled brown hair nearly like his father’s. Behind him limped Marielle, wearing a long enveloping blue robe. When she saw Michael she jerked herself back out of the room as if the floor under her uneven feet was redhot.
“It’s all right,” Annaleisa said quietly, though Emil had by now seen the submachine gun. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”
Marielle’s face, her blonde hair falling about her shoulders, peered carefully around the doorjamb.
“The German ship Javelin has come to take you,” Michael said, standing in the center of the room. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
Paul regained his composure. A muscle worked in his jaw. “How did they find out?”
“Loose lips,” said the captain, “sink ships. True a thousand years ago, true today.”
“Torture probably had something to do with it,” Michael answered. “Or money. There were several people who knew. One may have been a double-agent. In any case, speculation about that will have to wait for the experts to backtrack the trail. Right now, there’s the Jave—”
“Captain! Excuse me, please!” Enam Kpanga had come into the room. He nodded at the Wesshausers before he focused his full attention on Beauchene. “Sir, the ship’s pulled up on the port side. They’re hailing you with a bullhorn.”
Beauchene simply stared at the African.
“Sir? Did you—”
“Get out of this room,” Beauchene said, standing up from his chair. “This is a private room. A nice room. Do you think people in this room want to smell you in here?”
Michael winced. He saw Kpanga swallow hard.
“Sir?” the African said, with a note of pleading in his voice. “I only wanted to—”
“Smell up this room, oui. You’ve done your job. Get out.”
Kpanga gave a look to Michael of forlorn indignation. His mouth opened as if he wished to say something, perhaps to make some explanation of the captain’s remarks. But no explanation could be made. Kpanga closed his mouth, straightened his back which had begun to hunch as if readying for the strike of a bullwhip, and strode quickly out of the room.
“You and me,” Beauchene told Michael. “Up on deck.” He braced the Thompson against his shoulder and without another word to the Wesshausers or their children he went into the hall.
“Wasn’t that a little harsh?” Michael asked as they walked.
“He’s a black nigger,” came the flat response. “Worse than that, he’s a college boy.”
The rain had again tapered to a nasty drizzle. A smear of faint gray light had begun to show to the east. Javelin was so close to the port side of Sofia the two ships were almost trading paint. Michael took the revolver from his waistband. The other crewmen with weapons were lined along the portside gunwale. They were facing a dozen black-garbed men, also wielding rifles and pistols, who were lined along Javelin’s starboard gunwale. A Javelin searchlight swung back and forth across the scene, stabbing the eyes. Sofia, still at full speed, shuddered over a wave and shards of white foam was flung up between the hulls. The sound of diesels was the muffled beat of wardrums.
“Captain of the Sofia!” called a voice over a bullhorn. “Show yourself!” There was a few seconds’ pause. “Captain of the Sofia! Show yourself!” That same request and pause was repeated over and over.
Michael had a good view of Javelin. It did, indeed, look like any ordinary freighter. Its mast and running lights illuminated coils of ropes, lifeboats, ventilation funnels, capstans, nettings, various machines and cables used in hoisting cargo and the like. Michael saw a figure in a black raincoat and a white captain’s cap standing at the railing up at the blue-lit wheelhouse. Just watching, casually examining the scene. Captain Manson Konnig, in the flesh?
“Captain of the Sofia! Show—”
Gustave Beauchene stepped forward and fired off a short burst from his Tommy that shattered the arrogant searchlight and instantly killed it.
Seven
In Sheep’s Clothing
Two seconds after the searchlight’s death, a rifle was fired from Javelin. A bullet whacked the gunwale in front of Beauchene. Someone else on Sofia pulled the trigger. A bullet sang off Javelin’s superstructure. Then the shooting started overlapping each other, echoing between the ships. A porthole on Sofia was smashed. Everyone crouched down behind whatever cover they could find. A bullet zipped past Michael’s left shoulder as he knelt behind the gunwale. Beauchene’s Thompson chattered and bullets beat against steel.
Several shots rang out fast upon each other, and there came a cry of pain from one of Sofia’s crew. Michael got off two bullets at a man in a black rainslicker and cap who scurried up a stairway. He saw the man clutch at his left thigh. Bullets slammed into the gunwale before Michael, causing him to duck his head.
Suddenly from amidships on Javelin there was the noise of a bolt going back.
A belt-fed machine gun began to speak, its tone deadly. Bullets bit into Sofia’s deck, ricocheted off a capstan and pocked holes through a lifeboat. Michael lifted his head and saw the machine gun and its team up on a metal-shielded platform that a few moments before had been camouflaged with a gray canvas tarp. The gunner swivelled his weapon back and forth, spraying bullets across Sofia. Michael got off two more shots and saw sparks fly off the metal shield. Then the machine gun came hunting for him and nearly chewed through the gunwale in its enthusiasm.
More of Sofia’s bullets banged into the metal shield. The gunners shifted targets and fired at the annoying hornet’s nest. Michael squeezed the rest of his bullets off and quickly reloaded. A high-pitched klaxon alarm suddenly began, ear-cracking in intensity.
It was coming from an electric whistle atop the superstructure. Javelin picked up speed and began to move away, changing course to port. The firi
ng kept on, even as the two ships widened their distance.
At last, there was no use in shooting because the range was too far.
Michael stood up. Gunsmoke still whirled in the air. He watched Javelin hurry across the gray waves. “Who’s hit?” he called, and Olaf shouted back that it was the Dutchman, shot through the right wrist. “We held them off!” Gustave Beauchane was on his feet but he was staggering with shock. “We held them off! Mon Dieu, nous l’avons fait!” Then he looked to one side and his giddy grin faded. He saw the Spaniard lying a few feet away with the top of his head blown away and glistening bits of brain laid out upon the deckboards.
His eyes narrowed, Michael was watching Javelin continue to move away at about ten knots. He saw activity at the stern. A dark shape was rising from the deck. Something covered with another tarpaulin. He wondered if an electric winch was at work.
There was similar activity toward the bow. Something rose up on a platform to a height just above the gunwale. Men moved about in trained and deliberate order. The tarps were removed. Michael realized with a start that he was looking at the steel gun shields and the barrels of two five-inch cannons that had been artfully hidden below the deck.
Javelin was not a freighter. It was a warship.
A wolf, he thought. Dressed in sheep’s clothing.
As he stared across the waves in what for him was nearly shock, Michael saw Javelin swing into a broadside position.
“Christ!” Billy Bowers said, standing a few feet away. He shouted the next: “They’ve got big guns!”
The forward cannon fired with a gout of smoke. There was a thunderclap and a waterspout rose up directly in front of Sofia’s bow. The freighter trembled in a sharp turn to starboard. There was the noise of everything loose crashing together and men lost their footing on the rainslick deck.
The cannon toward the stern fired. Hanging onto the gunwale, Michael felt the shell’s impact like a blow to the belly. Sofia gave a wounded cry. She’d been hit up near the bow. The forward cannon fired a second time. Michael heard the air sizzle as the shell passed just over the ship, and a waterspout shot up to starboard. Once more the stern gun spoke, and again Sofia was shaken by a hit. The ship was zigzagging violently; either the Swede or Medina was putting his back to the wheel.
The Hunter From the Woods Page 7