Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

“Your crew? I’m sure your officers are.”

“Hard to tell, with the crew. They always do what needs to be done, that’s just life in the merchant marine. I think the men with families in Holland like the idea of a raid. As for the rest, it’s probably different for each of them. We had six German crewmen in August of ’39, then, in September, after war was declared, four of them asked to sign off, including our second engineer, and we put them ashore in Valparaiso. But the other two stayed on. There was a time when we didn’t think about these things-nation of the sea and all that-but then the politics started, in 1933, and everything changed. Our chief engineer, Kovacz, was an officer in the Polish navy. He came aboard in January of 1940, in Marseilles. He’d been in port, up in Gdansk, when the Germans attacked. His ship blew up in the harbor.”

“Bombed?”

“Sabotage, he says.”

“Bloody war.”

“We had to sign him on as a fireman, but we lost our chief engineer a few months later and Kovacz was right there in the engine room. We’re lucky to have him.”

“And your two Germans? Still aboard?” He meant the question to sound like ordinary conversation, but there was an edge in his voice.

“Yes, and they’re good seamen. One’s an anarchist, the other didn’t want to die for Hitler. He’s young, nineteen maybe. They’ve had a few bad moments, fights in the crew quarters. Officially, I don’t know about it, and the men sorted it out among themselves.”

“It’s no different with us,” Sims said. “An officer can only do so much.”

Sympathy, DeHaan thought, as commanders we all face the same problems, and decided to take advantage of it. “What are you after, Major, on Cap Bon? I know I shouldn’t ask but I’m responsible for this ship, and for the lives of my crew, and on that basis maybe I have a right to know.”

Sims didn’t like it. Went silent as a stone, and, for a long minute, it was very quiet on the bridge. Then he walked over to the bulkhead, away from the helmsman. DeHaan let him stand there for a while before he followed.

“For you only, Captain DeHaan. May I have your word on that?”

“You have it.”

“Commando operations are meant to do many things: they upset the enemy, they help public morale-if they’re reported, they destroy strategic facilities. Communications networks, power stations, drydocks.”

Sims was just talking so DeHaan waited, and was rewarded.

“Also,” Sims said, “coastal observation points.”

“Like Cap Bon.”

“Yes, like Cap Bon. They seem to be able to watch our ships, even at night, in dense fog. We must get convoys through, Captain, to our bases on Malta and Crete, because the Germans are going to attack them. Must. Without these bases, as points of interception, our forces in Libya, all our operations in North Africa, are in peril.”

“At night? In fog?”

“Yes.”

“Can that actually be done?”

“Apparently it can. We suspect they’re using infrared searchlights, which can ‘see’ the heat of ship engines.”

DeHaan knew the span of nautical technology-there was hardly any aboard the Noordendam but it was still his job to know what there was. Even so, he had never heard the expression infrared. “What kind of searchlights, did you say?”

“Infrared. An invisible barrier, like a curtain, projected from both shores. Bolometers, Captain.” Sims almost smiled. “Sorry you asked?”

“I know about radio waves, radars, but, after that…”

“Goes back to the Great War, in Germany, they’ve been playing with it for a long time. But, now that I’ve told you, here’s my end of the bargain. If we manage to get technical equipment back to your ship, and something happens, to me, and my lieutenant, be a good fellow and make damn sure the thing finds its way to a British base. Will you do that?”

DeHaan said he would.

“There,” Sims said. “You see? All you needed was something more to think about.”

On the tenth of May, in the early evening, they passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. The mist and rain continued, but they steamed with running lights on, as a devil-may-care neutral ship would, and DeHaan could feel the telescopes and binoculars of the shore watch, British and German, French and Spanish, as they entered the Mediterranean.

DeHaan did not remain on the bridge for his midnight watch, instead, after a look at the charts, he left the helmsman to work alone and met with Ratter, Kees, and Kovacz in the wardroom. Ratter had the assistant cook produce coffee and a can of condensed milk, which he poured liberally into his mug while repeating the time-honored quatrain “No shit to pitch / No tits to twitch / Just punch a hole / In the sonofabitch,” then stirred it in with the end of a pencil.

“It looks like we’re going to be on time,” DeHaan said. “The twelfth, just before midnight. Sometime after that, the commandos go ashore. We’ll run them in as close as we dare, then drop anchor about two miles out, ship dark, and there we wait. The signal for return is two flashes of a green light, so we’ll have deckhands standing by to lower scramble nets.”

“And the gangway?”

“Might as well.”

“What if they don’t show up?” Kees said.

“We wait. For three days.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Ratter said, “Three days? Anchored off Tunisia?”

“We’ll be boarded,” Kees said.

DeHaan nodded.

Finally Kees said, “What about the weather?”

“Last report from Mr. Ali, the meteorological forecast for allied shipping, says that this system has settled in all over southern Europe, and is likely to continue.” The forecast came in code-the weather-report war one more small war within the big war.

“We want that, right?” Ratter said.

“I suppose we do. Anyhow, we’ll need to rework the watch list, so we have the best people at the helm, and on deck.”

“Vandermeer at the helm?” Kees said.

“No, on watch. Young eyes are better.”

“Schoener, then,” Ratter said.

“A German, for this?” Kees said.

“He’s right,” DeHaan said. “Use Ruysdal. He’s older, and steady.”

“Mr. Ali in the radio room?”

“As usual. But I want a good signalman, maybe Froemming, on deck with the Aldis lamp.” He meant the hand-operated, shuttered light that flashed messages.

DeHaan turned to Kovacz. As with many Poles, Kovacz’s second language was German, sufficiently fluent so that Dutch, the nautical part of the language at any rate, came easily to him. He was a little older than DeHaan, stooped and bearlike, with thinning curly hair and sunken, red-rimmed eyes. His speech, always deliberate, came in a deep, gravelly bass thickened by a heavy accent.

“Stas,” DeHaan said. “You take the engine room, with your best oiler and fireman.”

Kovacz nodded. “Boilers up full?”

“Yes, ready to run for it.”

“Run like hell,” Kovacz said with a grin. “Screw down the safety valve.”

“Well, be ready to do it if you have to. Everything working?”

From Kovacz, an eloquent shrug. “It works.”

“Lifeboats in good shape?” DeHaan asked Ratter.

“I’ll make sure of the water tanks. The chocolate ration’s missing, of course.”

“Replace it. Davits, lines, blocks?”

“I replaced a rotten line. Otherwise, all good.”

The assistant cook knocked at the wardroom door, then entered. He was an Alsatian, short and plump, with a classic mustache, who looked, to DeHaan, like the dining-car steward he’d once been. “Patapouf,” DeHaan said, the word was French slang for fatty. “More coffee, please. Any dessert left from dinner?”

“Some pudding, Captain.” A thick, potato-starch concoction with dried dates.