The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

by David Black

  Fleming had moved on swiftly, not wishing to dally over his miscalculation, whatever it had been.

  ‘Your last Skipper seemed quite impressed, however,’ he said, with an insouciant smile. ‘And the French like you . . . Anyway, we can’t have any surprises on this one, so we had to rake over the coals just to be on the safe side.’

  Fleming, having regained his poise, continued: ‘Now, regarding this mission your boat is on. We’re picking up lots of flutters from behind the curtains. Apparently the French are very sensitive about it. Can’t spell it all out to you, of course. All very hush-hush. Suffice to say the chaps at Carlton Gardens are all in a flap about ensuring it succeeds. They’re very concerned your Skipper is going to behave himself . . . and do what he’s told. And since even Mon Général de Gaulle seems to be flapping, we thought we’d better keep a weather eye out too. Just to be on hand . . . lest our esteemed allies should need us to step in.

  ‘Also, something else to be aware of when you phone home . . . to keep an eye out for . . . You chaps might not be alone when you get down there to Martinique. The French have another submarine lurking about over on this side of the pond. Durandal. A bloody ridiculous great tub it is; with lots of big guns sticking out of it and an aircraft hangar strapped to its back. It’s in the Brooklyn Navy Yard right now; the Yanks having kindly agreed to buff it up and make it fit for active service; with us having to pay for it, needless to say, up front in hard-earned US dollars. Now I haven’t a clue what it’s intending to do or who is intending to do it, once it’s back at sea . . . but it has come to our attention that the crew might have some ideas of their own.

  ‘When it was in here, in Halifax, a number of the officers apparently made no bones about who they preferred when it came to a choice between de Gaulle and Pétain. So I’m sure you will understand HMG’s concern, especially if it comes to having some monstrosity out of the pages of Jules Verne rampaging around France’s Caribbean colonies flying the flag for Vichy. What would our American cousins say? And that is why we would like to have some forewarning about what’s going on down there . . . and we are relying on you, God help us . . . to help us out.’

  ‘I see, Sir,’ said Harry, with that sinking feeling you get when you’re being roped into someone else’s caper that you’d rather not know about.

  ‘I’m sure you do, young Harry,’ said Fleming, with Harry thinking, cheeky, patronising bastard. ‘Just one more item on the agenda,’ Fleming continued. ‘Just out of curiosity, will you be discussing our little chat with Captain Syvret by any chance?’

  Harry considered him. ‘I hadn’t thought about it, Sir. Am I being ordered not to?’ All ingenuous.

  Fleming sighed and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. ‘Would it make any difference?’

  Thank God he was back at sea, was all Harry could think to himself, out of the bloody road. It was funny how all that water between you and the drag of the land let you park what you didn’t want to deal with. Like the contents of the sack of letters that had caught up with him. And one letter in particular; from Shirley Lamont, short as it was. But out here, with the Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach a bare dozen miles or so over the western horizon, half a world away from home, all he had to deal with right now was Stalin, suddenly on the conning tower, rubbing against his legs, up for fresh air; his eager, upturned face demanding a chucking under the chin, and probably a lift for a better view of the wide ocean and America. Harry briefly wondered what Fleming would have thought of Radegonde’s Skipper having a dog called Stalin, but then decided he probably knew the dog’s name already.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sheer volume of shipping along the US east coast impressed Harry; tankers from the Gulf going north, general cargo going south, all of it sailing independently. With the United States resolutely neutral, what need was there here for convoys or escorts, or a blacked-out coastline. There were no U-boats to thwart in these waters. It did, however, require a studious watch to be kept, especially through the hours of darkness as the horizon danced with navigation lights, and even the odd Christmas-tree display thrown out by passing cruise liners heading, like them, for the Caribbean.

  It was a pure, sweet run south, across an ocean so calm that Captain Syvret ordered a rota allowing crewmen – who sometimes never saw daylight from one end of a patrol to the other – up on deck to spend two hours at a stretch lounging on the warmed wooden deck planks, smoking and sunning themselves.

  Also, as a tactic it would go a long way to allaying the suspicions of any patrolling US Navy PBY. A deck full of crew wouldn’t suggest a potential target ready to dive in a hurry, and might prevent them getting too excited at coming across a foreign submarine on the surface. It meant they might remain calm and stop to read the Morse code being frantically flashed at them from Radegonde’s bridge, and tune into the radio explanation of who they were dealing with.

  The one Treasury class US Coastguard cutter they passed didn’t even bother to close with them, so famous had the Free French submarine’s silhouette become on the coast by the time they reached the latitudes of Florida.

  It was down on these latitudes, on the morning of 23 June, that Leading Signalman Lucie, on radio watch, picked up from a Miami station the surprising news of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. That night, at dinner, the subject came up for debate. It was momentous news, but when Radegonde’s officers sat down to dine, Harry had something else on his mind.

  There had been other news that day: a signal from the Admiralty to Allied ships in the western Atlantic. This time it had been Cantor who had read it off for Harry to decode. The Free French submarine Durandal had sailed from New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard on 16 June, without telling her British Naval Liaison team. And since then, there had been no routine radio contact. She was supposed to have returned to Halifax, but having slipped her moorings while her attached Royal Navy Lieutenant and the two signallers who manned her radios were still tucked up in their hotel rooms, a good many people were now trying to surmise where she was headed instead. Repeated attempts over the previous week to raise Durandal on the usual naval frequencies had been unsuccessful and all units were alerted to keep a radio and visual lookout for her. Harry surmised that no one would be in any doubt now that her loyalty to Free France, de Gaulle and the Allied cause, had lapsed. Who her Captain was intending to sign up with next was the question. Was she heading back to Vichy, or would her Captain simply hand his command over to the Kriegsmarine?

  Harry was certain the routine radio traffic Lucie and Cantor were now receiving from Carlton Gardens for Radegonde, to be decoded by Captain Syvret only, must have contained similar alerts. But he wondered what other details those signals might contain.

  Meanwhile, back in the wardroom, the wider aspects of the war were being debated over several grilled dorado, caught that afternoon off Radegonde’s aft deck using homemade trawling lines. The fish was exquisite, Harry remembered thinking, as Poulenc and Bassano sagely agreed that with the Russians now on side in the war against Hitler, victory was assured. Thierry was doubtful; a highly mobile Wehrmacht moving fast on Moscow would obviously succeed where Napoleon had failed. Captain Syvret was uncharacteristically reticent, so Le Breuil baited him.

  ‘The pact, Captain, Sir,’ he said. ‘Was Stalin just playing for time, do you think? Pretending to be chummy in order to build up his forces so he could slam the trap shut? Luring Hitler on, eh, Sir? You communists, you’re damn cunning, Sir, aren’t you? We never believed you were really pals with Hitler, did we lads?’

  But Le Breuil had gone too far. Syvret had stared hard at him, cold hostility radiating from his flat face, until all conversation round the table had burbled to a stop, and they ended up eating in silence.

  Harry had gone up to check on the radio watch and was chatting to Cantor when Captain Syvret had gone past them in the kiosk on his way up to the bridge. Harry followed him into the balmy, star-blasted night, taking his cigarettes and coffee mug full of red wine up wi
th him.

  Syvret was leaning in Harry’s usual spot at the back of the conning tower, behind the periscope stands, well away from the lookouts and Faujanet, who had the watch. A long, dancing and sparkling wake stretched behind them straight and true, in iridescent greens and blues from the accumulation of billions of small plankton that glowed and shimmered in the darkness with a light they could see reflected in each other’s faces.

  Harry and Syvret had become much closer since Halifax, after Harry’s meeting at Admiralty House and his little chat with Fleming. Harry had gone looking for Syvret and had found him in the dockyard hut, closeted with the work schedules and the blueprints. He told Syvret everything that had been said both during the official meeting and his subsequent conversation with Fleming in the hotel. Syvret had heard him out, and when Harry had finished, he asked, ‘Aren’t you betraying secrets by telling me that?’

  Syvret’s reaction, the casualness of it, had given Harry pause for thought. Enough that he had later confided his concerns to Bassano, the friend of drunken runs ashore and discussions of English literature, to see if he could shed any light.

  ‘What did you say?’ Bassano had asked.

  ‘I said, if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,’ Harry had replied.

  ‘E.M. Forster,’ said Bassano, with his customary sage nodding. ‘Did he get the quote?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Harry had said, a bit exasperated that Bassano wasn’t getting the point. ‘I just wanted him to know that I felt we were both on the same side, and obviously in the same boat, and that it was only right he knew what was going on.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Bassano had said. ‘Don’t much care for Forster as a writer, but good quote though.’

  Bassano obviously had not wanted to discuss his Captain, but Harry could see from the wrinkle on his brow, he was equally puzzled. What did Syvret have on his mind that was so distracting?

  Harry hadn’t told Captain Syvret, or Bassano, about everything Fleming had said; about what he claimed he knew about Syvret’s indiscreet past, or what Fleming had been telling him about his own past, and about his father. Especially about his father, since he didn’t know what to think about Fleming calling his father, the holder of a Military Medal, a conshie; it had touched a nerve. There was history involved. A lot of it.

  For as long as Harry could remember there had always been a cloud over his father’s role in the Great War. Nobody talked about it. Nobody. It was one of those family things that was always steered away from, that neither time nor distance ever seemed to tire; ever eager to start gnawing away at your guts again if you dropped your guard. Harry hadn’t known whether to be angry or frightened, or both.

  But discussing his family skeletons hadn’t been why he had approached Bassano. Harry had been serious about them all being in the same boat. They might be in different navies, but Gil Syvret was his Skipper as much as Bassano’s. The way Harry saw it, he had been ordered to serve aboard Radegonde by the Royal Navy, and that meant that, while at sea, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Syvret was his Captain. Harry had received no orders to the contrary from any naval authority since being appointed and that meant while he remained a member of Radegonde’s ship’s company, Captain Syvret had every right to expect, indeed demand, his complete loyalty and obedience. Nothing that had been said during his meeting at Admiralty House had changed any of that. And as for that lounge lizard Fleming, whoever the hell he was, well just because he knew a hell of a lot about Captain Syvret, and about Free French internal intrigue, and, more importantly, about Harry, that didn’t mean he was in Harry’s chain of command; or had any right whatsoever to issue him orders of any kind. And, anyway, Harry hadn’t liked him.

  No, it was all because he liked his Captain, and he wanted him to know that stuff was going on behind his back, that people were pulling his strings. Harry hadn’t a clue how or why, but it simply felt important to let Captain Syvret know. And now Harry was worried because Captain Syvret hadn’t seemed interested or concerned; hadn’t even seemed, on the face of it, to be particularly grateful, or even to care whether Harry had done a right thing or a wrong thing. And that was why he was telling Bassano about it.

  Bassano let him fret it out for while, before saying, ‘I wouldn’t dwell on it. You’ve told him. The Captain probably knows there’s “stuff” as you put it, going on behind the curtains. String-pulling. Probably the only way you’d have shocked him would’ve been to tell him it wasn’t. He’s a fly old bird. He’ll be all right.’

  So Harry forgot about it, but he couldn’t help but notice that once they were back at sea, the Captain’s attitude towards Harry had become markedly more friendly; confiding, even, to the point where they now frequently met here, leaning over the aft conning tower rail for an evening smoke after dinner.

  ‘Why does everybody seem to think you’re a communist?’ asked Harry eventually, studiously not looking at Syvret.

  Syvret turned to face Harry, and said, very deliberately, ‘Can I ask you a question first?’ But he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Why is it when you ask me that, you make it sound as if you were asking me if I have syphilis?’

  ‘Sorry, Sir. I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful. I’m just curious, I suppose,’ said Harry, looking back at him.

  ‘About whether I’m syphilitic?’

  Harry laughed, then composed himself. ‘Sorry, Sir. You know I didn’t . . .’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Syvret, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Am I a communist.’ He said it as if it was statement rather than a question. ‘You want to know if I am a communist. To tell you the truth, I don’t know anymore. Am I? Was I ever, even? Well, there was a time when I thought the idea of communism was very intriguing, I suppose; when I was your age, or even younger. Growing up in a country that had just won a war, except it didn’t look like it. A notion abroad that there might be a better way. I suppose I thought there was something a bit noble about it. But, then, so was medieval chivalry, and we both know what a damn con that was.’

  The notion of someone actually being a proper communist was still something quite exotic to Harry; especially a continental communist. Yes, he had known some odd undergraduates with very public ideas about politics; and during the Spanish Civil War a lot of shipyard workers had demonstrated, and some of them actually went and got on ships to go and fight. But the students were all hot air, and the workers were too far beyond Harry’s world to be quite real. But hearing Syvret talk about communism, for the first time Harry felt he was in the presence of a considered life. Syvret was from a culture where ideas like communism and fascism were treated as real possibilities, and not just flights of fancy too extreme to be polite, let alone seriously contemplated.

  Harry had always thought himself well read in world affairs; he poured over the newspapers and even attended the odd public lecture; he had followed his country’s inevitable slide into war and he knew who the bogeymen were. In short, he knew why he was fighting; why Britain and her Commonwealth, and the Free French were fighting, and now the Soviet Union. But when he talked with Syvret, he felt he was talking with a more penetrating intellect, who saw more deeply into the cataclysm that was engulfing the world. There was a silence as they considered the dazzling light show cast up by the submarine’s wake, then, as if apropos of nothing, Syvret started talking again.

  ‘Engels maintained that the future of man was either socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, or barbarism,’ Syvret said. ‘But it appears now we have a third alternative being touted. Vigorously touted, you might even say. Utopia.’

  Harry looked puzzled. ‘The ideal world?’

  ‘Yes. A perfect world.’ Syvret smiled. ‘How else would you describe Hitler’s vision for Germany, and for the rest of us for that matter? His ideal? His perfect world? Have you read Mein Kampf?’ But Syvret did not wait for an answer. ‘Of course you haven’t. You are a right-thinking, well-educated, middle-class
, British young man. You would never even consider reading something so vulgar; infecting your mind with such drivel. It would never occur to you, at least I hope it wouldn’t. It occurred to me to read it, though. And it’s all in there; his vision for perfection, triumphant. Which is all very well, but beggars the question, what happens to the imperfect in a perfect world? When your prime minister Mr Churchill says the world faces being engulfed by a new dark age, I don’t think he is speaking figuratively. This is not an old-fashioned war like all the others we’ve ever known. This one isn’t about the politics or the injustice of the Great War settlement or the balance of power in Europe or a fight for trade or empire. Or even class.

  ‘So when you ask me if I am a communist, I don’t think I can see how your question can be relevant. But if you were to ask me why I fight. Why I think this war is just and right? That’s different. I know the answer to that, and it isn’t complicated at all. I want what everyone else wants. To live in a world where I can go to bed and sleep safe and well, get up in the morning and go to work for a living wage, and where no one can drag me off for no good reason without my neighbours shouting, “Hey! Hold on, you!” Where I can think my own thoughts and say so. And where, if I fall, there’ll be someone to pick me up. What ism would you call that? Simplistic, yes, I’d agree. But this war is all far too real for nuances, Harry. We’re up against a Utopia here; a vision of perfection; a place darker than hell. You can’t oppose that with ideas or arguments. The only thing that will work against that inhuman monster is the prompt application of maximum violence. That’s why I fight. How about you, Harry? Is that why you fight too?’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t,’ said Harry, ‘it bloody well is now.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Martinique was exactly where it should have been, at fourteen degrees, forty minutes north, sixty-nine degrees west; a rugged, mountainous green jewel set in a turquoise sea, with a little lace cap of wispy cloud clinging to its peaks. It was only just after ten a.m., but already it was hot and the humidity was rising on Radegonde’s bridge when Faujanet, who had the watch, spotted the peak of the island’s 1,400-metre-high volcano, Mont Pelée, as it popped above the horizon almost perfectly on their bow.