The Skipper's Dog's Called Stalin

by David Black

  ‘If there was no gold, why did Durandal have to kill them all?’ Harry asked. He couldn’t help himself despite what he’d decided – to stop worrying about it and just get on and do his duty. ‘And even if there had been gold, and they’d got it, would they have needed to kill them all? For the sake of a couple of hours start when they have the whole Atlantic to hide in?’

  ‘Spite?’ said Syvret, shrugging. ‘I’ve crossed paths with that bastard Boudron de Vatry before. He isn’t what you’d call an honourable man.’

  Harry’s brandy-laced coffee arrived and he took a big belt; Syvret had been right, he did need it. ‘What happens now, Sir?’ he said, wiping his chin.

  Syvret’s jaw set, so that his teeth were still clenched when he spoke. ‘He’s mine,’ he said, quietly.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The weather system curling up from the coast of Honduras had formed days before, from along the trailing ends of an unseasonal cold front that had descended from Canada down through the central United States and then hit the warmer waters of, first, the Gulf of Mexico, and then the western Caribbean Basin. The system had run into thunderstorms in the Basin, which had acted as an internal escalator, seamlessly transporting heat and moisture up into the growing storm’s core, kick-starting a cyclonic turning of the winds in the upper levels of the atmosphere, allowing what was now becoming an incipient tropical cyclone to grow and develop.

  It was now advancing west-nor’-west on a hundred-nautical-mile front and was less than thirty-six hours behind them as they headed out across the Atlantic along the same track. The long swell and the warm, syrupy air preceding the storm already held them in a firm grasp.

  A chart of the eastern Atlantic, off the Windward Islands, was spread over the wardroom table, along with a stack of all the US Navy weather forecasts transcribed by Cantor over the past twenty-four hours; an atlas lay open at the pages showing the full mid-Atlantic reach, and on it in red pencil was a great circle line following the curve of the globe all the way from Martinique to Casablanca in French Morocco. Syvret was presiding, and all of Radegonde’s officers were there too, apart from Poulenc who had the watch. Even Maître principal de Maligou and Beyfus, the engineering Premier maître, were there, perched on stools in the passageway. The wardroom’s little deckhead light gave the scene an air of some Jacobean conspiracy, except no one was drinking; with the fiddles gone to make room for the chart, the long, monotonous rise and fall of the boat would have sooner or later rolled any tumbler or bottle off the ends. Harry was aware that Stalin was curled up under Syvret’s feet, busy being very still.

  ‘I’ve sailed these waters before,’ said Syvret, ‘and so has the Maître principal, and from what we’re seeing here’, he patted the pile of forecasts, ‘we both agree our friend does not look like she’s going to grow up to be a hurricane; at least not before she hits us.’

  ‘It’s too early in the season,’ agreed a grim-faced de Maligou, ‘and from the wrong direction.’

  ‘But we’re still going to be in for one hell of a blow,’ Syvret added. ‘Tropical storms are not ladies to be trifled with.’

  Syvret leaned into the chart where he’d already roughly pencilled in the track of the storm, and drew a dotted line, south of Martinique and up out into the Atlantic and north in a huge curve.

  ‘She’ll go where she wants, but that is my best estimate for the path this young lady will take,’ said Syvret. ‘She’ll advance at about thirteen and fourteen knots, but her cyclonic winds – they blow anti-clockwise – could be anything from thirty-five to sixty knots, gusting much higher; and as for the sea state, we can expect waves of at least four metres. I am not planning to avoid it; I am planning to use it.’

  Harry had noticed, when he’d sat down, that something was wrong; something in the air. And it wasn’t just the lack of drink, either. Because whatever it was had just ratcheted up a notch. And that’s when it hit him; the reason. He wanted to slap his head. Of course! What else could it have been? He hadn’t said as much yet, but Syvret was planning to chase Durandal, and when he found her, he was planning to sink her. And everybody knew exactly what that meant: Frenchmen killing Frenchmen. And these Frenchmen weren’t happy with that. Durandal might have been responsible for killing that mongrel crew on Pascagoula – the Americans, Jamaicans, Mexicans and Costa Ricans. Yes, it had been an atrocity. But atrocity or no atrocity, by going after Durandal they were talking about the lives of fellow French sailors here, and who made Captain Syvret their judge and jury? And who said the Durandal’s sailors were all guilty? They were men just like them. Radegonde’s officers, and the senior rates who were there to represent her crew; they didn’t like the idea at all.

  ‘As it turns north I intend to get us into the western hemisphere of the storm,’ continued Syvret, seemingly oblivious. ‘If we get there ahead of its eye we can get out of it ahead of Durandal. Because of the winds blowing counter-clockwise, if you end up in the eastern half, the actual speed of the storm system as it advances gets added to the cyclonic wind speeds in the system itself. But once you’re on the western side, it’s different; the system’s track speed acts against the cyclonic speed, and you can lose up to thirty knots of blow. The sea state will also be less and that means we can move faster. It also means we are better able to dive, and to surface.’

  Even Harry knew the dangers of submerging or surfacing in heavy weather; the near impossibility of maintaining trim, the likelihood you’ll uncover vents when you don’t intend to, or have your blowing tanks smothered by seas. Then there was the matter of metacentric height. Harry had seen the diagrams and the equations in books and thought he’d understood them then. But sitting here, at sea, with the Captain talking about navigating in hurricane winds, it all went blank. All he could remember was that it was all about calculating the stability of a vessel and the relationship to its centre of gravity, and if you got it wrong, you capsized. And that loss of control was just a raging wave crest or plunging trough away.

  ‘And since Durandal doesn’t know we’re here,’ added Syvret, ‘then we have every chance of getting ahead of her before she emerges from the storm. Because I think we all know where she’ll be headed. I don’t think there’s any doubt. She’s running home to papa, just like all bad girls do. Back to Casablanca. Into the arms of Admiral Darlan and ready, like the rest of the Vichy fleet, to be handed over to Hitler. Well, I don’t think so.’

  His speech was met with glum faces, and a silence and disinterest Harry had never seen before. While the Captain was all gestures and enthusiasm, everyone else round the table just sat; each one with an expression like a mongoose watching a cobra. Which was about where Captain Syvret finally cottoned on to the fact he had a problem.

  ‘Harry,’ he said affably, not looking at him, ‘please ask the First Lieutenant to come down here. And Harry, would you mind taking over the watch for a bit.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Aye aye, Sir,’ said Harry, and was glad to be gone.

  Radegonde was on a heading that was essentially the great circle route to Casablanca, following a 3,500-mile curve across the face of the globe at a steady twelve knots. Somewhere out ahead of her would be Durandal, following the same course, if Captain Syvret was right; but probably at only nine to ten knots. She was a bigger boat, Syvret had said by way of stating the bleeding obvious, and burned more fuel to push herself the same distance as Radegonde; and she might well have fuel worries on top of that unfortunate fact, not having topped up since leaving the Brooklyn Navy Yard. ‘While we, as our American friends say, are operating on a full tank of gas,’ Syvret had added.

  Harry scanned ahead every time they rose on a wave crest, searching the far horizon line across a huge expanse of rising sea. He didn’t notice Bassano had come on to the bridge until he was standing beside him. Bassano should have asked permission of the officer of the watch, but one look told Harry his friend was more than a little distracted.

  ‘Captain Syvret’s sure Durandal’s headi
ng for Casablanca?’ Harry eventually asked, to break the silence. The three young matelots on watch with Harry, binoculars stuck to their faces, did not flinch from their duty, but even out of the corner of his eye, Harry could’ve sworn their ears were twitching to catch every word of what was about to be said.

  ‘Jean Bart’s there,’ said Bassano, not really engaged.

  Harry interrupted him. ‘The new, fast battleship?’ he said.

  Bassano nodded. ‘And three or four light cruisers. Destroyers. Other stuff. To get into Toulon or Oran, Durandal would have to sneak past Gibraltar. The Atlantic ports are all in Jerry hands. So it’s a good bet.’

  Another pause.

  ‘He keeps insisting Admiral Darlan’s going to hand the whole lot to Hitler,’ Bassano eventually resumed, still staring out into the rolling troughs. ‘But we don’t know that. It’s not what Darlan’s saying. He’s saying it’s all about the treaty. Compiègne the second; where Hitler made sure we surrendered in the same railway carriage where we made the Boche surrender after the Great War; just to rub it in.’ Bassano sighed. ‘We keep to the treaty, Jerry keeps out of Vichy. The treaty says we don’t hand over our fleet to Churchill. We break the treaty and Jerry doesn’t stay out of Vichy.’ And then there was a long pause.

  Harry didn’t interrupt this time, to state another ‘bleedin’ obvious’ – that Hitler didn’t have a very good track record on keeping treaties.

  ‘The Captain believes Darlan’s pro-Nazi; and so is Boudron de Vatry,’ Bassano finally broke his own silence. ‘But he isn’t . . . Darlan isn’t; he’s just playing politics like he always does. I wouldn’t like to speak for Boudron, though. And none of it’s helped by the fact that the Captain doesn’t like either of them. So now he’s on a mission.’

  ‘And the crew don’t like it?’ said Harry.

  For the first time Bassano looked at him, and Harry could see the fear in his eyes.

  ‘You can see that?’

  Harry didn’t reply.

  ‘I suppose it’s obvious,’ said Bassano. ‘The crew don’t give a stuff about treaties, or Admiral Darlan, or that Boudron is a murderer and maybe even a fascist, and that he has shamed the Marine Nationale; but the crew won’t kill French sailors.’

  ‘And what does Captain Syvret say?’ asked Harry.

  ‘That the Radegonde isn’t a commune. And they will obey orders.’ Bassano rubbed his face in his hands. ‘So here we are, playing nursery games with a nearly hurricane, and a surly crew. I don’t know these waters, but I’ve seen a nearly typhoon, trying to beat it into Cam Ranh Bay. It scared the shit out of me. All to hunt a quarry that if we catch it, we could end up with a mutiny.’

  Captain Syvret was busy with his diagrams; marking the path of the tropical storm. From the latest weather report it had clipped the south end of Martinique several hours previously, with its eye passing up to thirty miles off shore. Even so the sustained wind speed had hit over sixty knots, with five-metre wave troughs, but the storm front had shrunk a little, to something a bit less than seventy miles; and it was already beginning to curve north, closing in on them.

  Already Radegonde was bouncing on a sea that was beginning to become more confused as the outer fringes of the storm advanced and was no longer pushing the sea, but starting to churn it. Syvret ordered Radegonde trimmed down to decks awash. By partially flooding her tanks, just a little, he was lowering her centre of gravity. For, in many ways, a submarine, even on the surface, is one of the most seaworthy boats to brave a storm in; sealed as she is against wind and wave. She might bounce around a bit, and things could get very uncomfortable for those on watch on the bridge, but she could never be overwhelmed. And if things got too bad, you could always dive; but if you left that too late, getting down could be tricky. Coming up could be even trickier, and you never knew how long it would take a storm to pass as you consumed battery amps and sat about while your air turned foul; the gigantic waves making it difficult to tell whether you were still underwater or on the surface, ready to roll back down into the deep. No; riding it out on the surface, you’d be fine, just as long as the battery acid didn’t spill and mix with bilge water and turn your boat into a chlorine gas chamber. And Radegonde had already had to have some battery cells repaired after action against the U-boats in the Atlantic.

  Harry watched Captain Syvret sketch his plan, but not being experienced in this kind of bad weather, he didn’t realise the plan was to execute a manoeuvre no mariner should ever attempt – to cross the T of a hurricane, or indeed anything approaching it, like a tropical storm. So he was curious, instead of afraid, as he should have been. No one else was at the wardroom table – no one else was talking to the Captain.

  Syvret made room for Harry and smoothed out the chart.

  ‘We’re here, and this is the track of the storm,’ he said, indicating an X on the expanse of ocean and a circle about the size of a two-bob piece. ‘This is the likely curve of its arc as it turns north, and I aim to hit that outer ring of wind about here’ – another jab with his pencil. ‘Your men Lucie and Cantor are being very good about keeping me up to date as to where our friend is now. She’s singing like a songbird. God knows what she’s saying, but Boudron obviously thinks he’s got away with it. He’ll be telling papa all about it. Then it’ll be just a short summer cruise across the Atlantic, and he’ll be home.’

  Cantor would know Durandal’s radio operator by his fist all right; it was his talent, being able to tell one operator from another simply from the way he stroked the Morse key.

  ‘He’s in no hurry, so he’ll go south about, round the bottom of the system,’ continued Syvret, ‘and then come back on his great circle course about here. I can’t think of any reason he’ll shut up now, so your radio boys will pin him as he does.’ He gave Harry a quick smile, and slid a big French coin to cover the pencil outline of the storm; then he moved it following his pencilled curve. ‘Now, when the storm is here, if we cut across, into the thirty-five-knot wind boundary, we’ll be inside the system, with the system’s cyclonic winds fine on our port bow; but the northerly track of the storm will be acting against the cyclonic wind. The two titanic blasts will be acting against each other. Yes, we’ll have to slow down a little because of the sea state, but by cutting across the leading edge of the storm, we will have less distance to cover; and if we escape the system here, we’ll be waiting for Boudron as he comes back on to his mean course, here’ – another jab at the chart, at another X. ‘Elegant, n’est-ce pas?’

  Bassano had the watch. There were only two matelots on the bridge with Harry now, pixie-like in sou’westers, not that anyone was able to see much anymore. They were getting close to the cyclonic winds; Harry could tell by the contrary buffets that hit him when he put his head above the bridge front.

  Night was coming; all around as far as the eye could see in the water-filled air, it was already dark, but the night itself was a different thing, like an obsidian lid, slowly being rolled over them from the west. The sea was confused with waves, no longer endless rolling ridge lines, but cross-hatched and colliding, throwing up crests of flying spume; and it was cold now. All the humidity had gone out of the air, and Harry was shivering in his already drenched shirt.

  The matelots were secured by safety lines and Bassano, bareheaded like Harry, had to undo his to follow him to the aft end of the conning tower. The periscope stands provided little cover from the wind, which was now a semi-permanent roar, and the spray.

  What happened next was a series of bawls and yells in each other’s ears as Harry communicated to Bassano the Captain’s intention. Bassano kept shaking his head – crossing a storm’s T? He is mad! He risks the boat! He cannot know how fast or slowly the storm will advance; where he will enter it. He has only the last readings; he cannot know what it is doing now: its winds, the sea state; and even if he does get lucky, and they get through undamaged, what then? What happens when he orders the torpedoes fired? At other Frenchmen?

  ‘He has to be stoppe
d!’ Harry yelled in Bassano’s ear.

  Bassano stared back at him through a plastered flop of his hair.

  ‘I know!’ yelled Harry. ‘We can’t. But Boudron de Vatry can.’

  Bassano continued to stare, worried now.

  ‘By not being there,’ said Harry, finally.

  Harry hadn’t slept more than a catnap since before Durandal turned up and started bombarding Fort-de-France. He was pretty sure Captain Syvret hadn’t even managed that.

  ‘How long until we intercept her, Sir?’ Harry asked, peering between Syvret and Poulenc at Radegonde’s chart table. The Captain and his First Lieutenant were discussing their course.

  Syvret shrugged. ‘Hard to say. There’s a lot of variables . . . maybe as much as eighty nautical miles to run . . . we’re already having to reduce speed. Ten hours, maybe more. Why?’

  ‘When did you last get your head down, Sir?’ said Harry, his face suffused with concern. Even if a vestige of conspiracy had shown through, Captain Syvret was far too tired to notice.

  ‘Harry’s right, Sir,’ said Poulenc, entirely innocent of Harry’s motives. ‘A couple of hours now; you’ll feel the benefit when the time comes.’

  Harry gave Syvret ten minutes in his cabin before he dragged Cantor from the comforts of the Stokers’ mess. Lucie was also there, asleep in a borrowed bunk, tucked in with Stalin, and Harry couldn’t help but suspect that Lucie had climbed into it drunk. How else had he stayed asleep when the dog had jumped up and burrowed in with him? There’d be a time to worry about that later. Maybe. Harry and Cantor climbed up into the empty conning tower kiosk. Above was Bassano, on watch; below, Le Breuil was in the control room, dead reckoning their waypoints on the chart.