Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

“Well,” DeHaan said, “why not.”

“We agree. Whatever their peculiarities, you soon discover, as part of a government in exile, the importance of patriots who have their wealth abroad.”

“And want to spend it,” Terhouven said.

“Yes, but not only that. What you saw here tonight was the North African station of the Royal Dutch Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence.”

Terhouven and DeHaan were silent, then Terhouven said, “May one ask how you found them?”

One may not — but Leiden never said it. Terhouven was himself a patriot of this category and that, by the slimmest of margins, bought him an answer. “They volunteered-at the consul’s office in Casablanca. There were others, of course, more than you’d expect, but these two we decided we could trust. If not to be good at it, at least to be quiet. This sort of connection excites people, in the beginning, and they simply must tell, you know, ‘just one friend.’” He spoke the last words in the voice of the indiscreet, then turned to DeHaan and said, “You can depend on them, of course, but one of the axioms of this work is that you don’t abandon your, ah, best instincts.”

DeHaan began to understand the dinner. For a time, he’d thought he might be asked to serve on one of the Dutch warships that had escaped capture in 1940 and gone on to fight alongside the British navy. Now he knew better. Yes, he was newly a Luitenant ter Zee 1ste Klasse, but-and Terhouven’s presence confirmed his suspicion-it was the Noordendam that was going to war.

“And Wilhelm?” Terhouven said.

“Our wireless/telegraph operator. And, just as important, she knows people-migrs and Moroccans, plain folk and otherwise. An artist, you see, can turn up anywhere and talk to anyone and nobody cares. Very useful, if you’re us. She was among the first to apply, I should add, and her father was a senior officer in the army. So, maybe it’s true, blood will tell and all that.”

“Are they to give me orders?” DeHaan said, not sounding as neutral as he thought.

“No. They will help you-you will need their help-and they may serve as a retransmission station for our instructions to you.”

“Which are?”

“What we want you to do, and this is the broad answer, is to carry on the war. We, which is to say Section IIIA of the Admiralty General Staff, currently find ourselves crammed into two small rooms in D’Arblay Street, in Soho. Some of us have to share desks, but, frankly, we never had all that much space in The Hague, and we’d learned, over the years, to accept a certain, insignificance. With Holland a neutral state, as she’d been in the Great War, the government had better things to do with its money than to buy intelligence. We had the naval attachs in the embassies, ran a small operation now and again, watched a few ports. Then the roof fell in and we lost the war in four days-the army hadn’t fought since 1830, nobody anticipated attacks by parachute and glider, the queen sailed away, and we surrendered. We were humiliated, and, if we didn’t believe that, the British found ways to let us know it was true. In their eyes, we stood with the French, the Belgians, and the Danes-not the ‘brave but outmanned Greeks.’

“So now, in London, we are left to simmer in the exile stew-de Gaulle demands this, the Belgians want that, the Dutch navy turns the heat down and wears sweaters, because gas is expensive. Thank God, is all I can say, for our tugboat rescue service and for the ships of our merchant fleet, which sail, and are too often lost, in the Atlantic convoys. But Britain needs more-she needs America is what she really needs but they’re not ready to fight-and now she has decided, and we may have given her a little help in seeing it, that she needs us, D’Arblay Street, thus we need our friend Terhouven here, and we need you. Special missions, Lieutenant Commander DeHaan, at which you shall succeed. Thereby casting some very timely glory on Holland, the Royal Navy, and its beloved Section IIIA. So then, will it be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? ‘Maybe,’ unfortunately, is at present not available.”

DeHaan took a moment to answer. “Is the Noordendam to be armed?”

This was not a bad guess. Germany had armed merchant freighters and they’d been more than efficient. Sailing under false flags, with guns cleverly concealed, they approached unsuspecting ships, then showed their true colors, took the crews prisoner, and sank the ships or sent them off to Germany. One such raider had recently captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet, which mattered because whale oil was converted to glycerine, used for explosives.

But Leiden smiled and shook his head. “Not that we wouldn’t like to, but no.”

“Well, of course I’ll do it, whatever it is,” DeHaan said. “What about my crew?”

“What about them? They serve on the Noordendam, under your command.”

DeHaan nodded, as though that were the answer. In fact, such business as Leiden had in mind was first of all secret, but sailors went ashore, got drunk, and told whores, or anybody in a bar, their life story.

Leiden leaned forward and lowered his voice- now the truth. “Look,” he said, “the fact is that all Dutch merchant ships that survived the invasion are to come under the control of what’s called the Netherlands Ministry of Shipping, and most will then be under the management of British companies, which would put the Noordendam in convoy on the Halifax run, or down around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Suez Canal to the British naval base at Alexandria. But that won’t happen because the Royal Dutch Navy has chartered her from the Hyperion Line, at a rate of one guilder a year, with a Dutch naval officer in command.”

DeHaan saw that Leiden and Terhouven were looking at him, waiting for a reaction. “Well, it seems we’ve been honored,” he said, meaning no irony at all. They truly had been, to be chosen in this way, though he suspected it would be honor bought at a high price.

“You have,” Terhouven said. Now live up to it.

“It’s not final,” Leiden said, “but there’s a good possibility that your sister ships will be run by British companies.”

“Lot of nerve, they have,” Terhouven said. “What’s the old saying-‘nation of pirates’?”

“Yes,” DeHaan said. “Like us.”

They all had a laugh out of that. “Well, it’s just for the duration,” Leiden said.

“No doubt,” Terhouven said sourly. The Netherlands Hyperion Line had come into existence in 1918, with Terhouven and his brother first chartering, then buying, at a very good price, a German freighter awarded as part of war reparations to France. Governments and shipowners, over the centuries, forever had their noses in each other’s business-bloody noses often the result.

“You’ve been at this a long time,” DeHaan said to Leiden.

“Since 1916, as a young ensign. I tried to get out, once or twice, but they wouldn’t let me go.”

This was not necessarily good news to DeHaan, who’d taken some comfort in Leiden’s being, from the look of him, an old seadog. But now Leiden went on to describe himself as “an old deskdog,” waiting a beat for a chuckle that never came.

“Haven’t been to sea all that much. Not at all, really,” Leiden said. Then smiled in recollection and added, “We never got out of Holland-six of us from the section-until August. Snuck down into Belgium one hot night and stole a little fishing smack, in Knokke-le-Zoute. Hardly any fuel in the damn thing-that’s how the Germans keep them on the leash-but there was a sail aboard and we managed to get it rigged. All of us were in uniform, mind you, because we didn’t want to get shot as spies if they caught us. We drifted around in the dark for a time-there was a good, heavy sea running that night-while our two amateur sailing enthusiasts had a, spirited discussion about which way to go. Then we realized what we looked like, ‘bathtub full of admirals’ somebody said, and we had to laugh. Office navy, that’s us.”