Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

“I see you’ve got steam up,” he said.

“It seems we’re leaving.”

Shalakov looked around, the deck was full of wandering people, the mustached men sat on their trunks, smoking cigarettes and talking. “Did the messenger reach you?”

“No. Just, all this.”

“It’s a madhouse. We’ve had Latvian gangs in the city, and Wehrmacht commandos.” He took a deep breath, then gave DeHaan a grim smile. “Will be a bad war,” he said. “And long. Anyhow, here is a list of the ships in your convoy.” A typed sheet of paper, the names of the ships transliterated into the Roman alphabet. “Communicate by radio, at six point five, don’t worry about code-not tonight. We’re going to the naval base at Tallinn, there’s no point in trying for Riga now. You’ll wait for the Burya, the lead destroyer, to sound her siren, and follow her. All ready to go?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on the minelayer Tsiklon — cyclone. So then, good luck to you, and I’ll see you in Tallinn.”

0130. Scheldt at the helm, lookouts fore and aft and on the bridge wings, Van Dyck with the fire crews, Kovacz and Poulsen in the engine room, Ratter and Kees with DeHaan on the bridge. The bombing that night was to the south and the east, above Liepaja there was only a single plane in the sky, dropping clouds of leaflets, which fluttered in the breeze as they drifted down to the port. At 0142, a couple came running along the quay, the woman dressed for an evening at a nightclub. They shouted up to the freighter, pleading in several languages, and DeHaan had the gangway lowered and took them aboard. The woman, who had run with her shoes in her hand, had tears streaming down her face, and fell to her knees when she reached the deck. One of the dancers came over and put an arm around her shoulders. They were fighting in the city now, bursts of gunfire, then silence, and from the bridge they could see lines of red tracer, streaming from the top of a lighthouse and the steeple of a waterfront church. Good firing points, DeHaan knew, though they’d been built high for other reasons.

At 0220 hours, the siren.

DeHaan turned the engine-room telegraph to Slow — Ahead, and, without the aid of tugboats, they moved cautiously out of the harbor. They could see the Burya, a half mile ahead, and fell in between a motor torpedo boat and an icebreaker. On the last pier in the winter harbor, a crowd of people, standing amid bags and bundles and suitcases, yelled and waved at the ships as they steamed past.

Following the destroyer, Noordendam made a long, slow turn to the north and the land fell away behind them. By 0245 they were well out to sea; a stiff wind, a handful of stars among the clouds, a few whitecaps. DeHaan called for Full — Ahead, the engine-room bell rang, then he said, “Mr. Ratter?”

“Aye, sir?”

“Run up the Dutch flag, Mr. Ratter.”

There were twenty ships, to begin with, strung out along the wake of the Burya. The working class of a naval fleet-supply tenders, tankers and minelayers, torpedo boats, minesweepers and icebreakers, a few old fishing trawlers made over into patrol boats, a small freighter. A little after three in the morning they lost the freighter, which broke down and had to drop anchor. The passengers stood silently on the deck and watched the convoy as it went by. An hour later, the Burya began to maneuver, a long series of course changes. By then, Maria Bromen had joined Mr. Ali in the radio room, translating the orders as they came in. Bearing two six eight, bearing two six two. Scheldt spun the wheel as DeHaan called them out. “We’re in a Russian minefield,” Ratter said.

He was right. A few minutes later a submarine tanker made an error, swung wide, was blown in half, and sank immediately, with only a few survivors swimming away from the burning oil in the water. One of the torpedo boats stopped to pick them up, then reclaimed its position in the convoy. An hour after dawn, off Pavilosta, the torpedo boat itself broke down, and drifted helplessly as the crew tried to repair the engine.

On the Noordendam, daylight revealed a deck with passengers everywhere. Some of them seasick-a crowd of Kiev dancers at the stern rail; some of them going off to the galley to help with the food-stacks of onion-and-margarine sandwiches for everybody; and some who seemed to be in shock, listless, staring into space. There were two bad falls: a marine down a ladderway, and a young boy, running along the deck, who slipped on a patch of oil. Shtern was able to take care of both.

Also with daylight: a German patrol plane. Kees tracked it with his binoculars and said it was a Focke-Wulf Condor, a long-range reconnaissance bomber. The plane circled them, flew long loops as it tracked them, staying in contact with the convoy as it crawled along at ten knots.

“Not in any hurry, are they,” Kees said.

“Back tonight,” Ratter said. “With friends.”

Night was still hours away. By ten o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth, they’d swung wide of the Gulf of Riga. “We’re not taking the inside passage,” DeHaan said, after orders repeated from the radio room. The inside passage, between the coast of Estonia and the islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa, was all shoals and shallows, marked by Estonian sailors with brooms mounted on buoys, a stretch of water avoided by merchant captains. So the officer on the Burya, or the fleet controllers at Tallinn, swung them to the west, into the open Baltic. By noon the Condor was back, well out of antiaircraft range, just making sure of their course and position before it flew home for lunch.

1930 hours. Off Hiiumaa island, Estonia.

Maria Bromen’s voice on the speaker tube: “They say, ‘Come to bearing zero one five degrees.’” This would lead them into the Gulf of Finland, then, in eight hours, to Tallinn. Safe passage, the first few miles, with air cover from the Russian naval base at Hang, surrendered by the Finns in March of 1940 at the end of the Russo-Finnish war. Safe passage, and a long Baltic dusk, the light fading slowly to dark blue. They were all tired now, the crew and the passengers. When DeHaan went down to the wardroom for a ten-minute break, the impresario Kherzhensky was sprawled on the banquette, wrapped in his cape and snoring away.

By 2130 they were off the Estonian island of Osmussaar. From the radio room: “They say to proceed at five knots, and they have called for minesweepers to come ahead of Burya.”

“German mines, now,” Kees said. “Or Finnish.”

“Could be anyone’s,” Ratter said. “They don’t care.”

After that, silence. Only the creak of the derricks, and the sound of ships’ engines nearby, running at dead slow, maneuvering themselves into line behind the two minesweepers. To port, DeHaan could see the minelayer Tsiklon, to starboard, a fishing trawler, its deck piled high with shipping crates. DeHaan kept looking at his watch. So, when the first ship hit a mine, somewhere up ahead, he knew it was 10:05.

They saw it. No idea what it was-had been. It was sinking by the stern, bow high in the water, some of the crew paddling a life raft with their hands. From the radio room: “Aircraft is coming now.”

They heard them, the rising drone, and the Burya ’s searchlights went on, followed by those of the other ships, bright yellow beams stabbing at the sky. “Stand by the lifeboats,” DeHaan said.

Kees swore and began to limp out toward the bridge wing. Ratter caught him by the arm. “I’ll do it,” he said.

“Hell you will.” Kees shook free and limped away.

DeHaan called down to the engine room. “Stas, we’re going to stand by lifeboats. Maybe air attack on the way.” Kovacz’s normal duty was command of the second boat.

“Number three boiler is giving problems,” Kovacz said. The run to Liepaja, DeHaan thought, had caught up with them.