Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Since the tide was out, the beach was particularly wide, almost a hundred yards from the water’s edge to the dunes. Cullen did not want to get lost in the fog, so he stuck close to the ocean where the sand was firmest. He amused himself by singing the latest hit songs, such as “I’ve Got a Girl in Kalamazoo” by Glenn Miller. There was one tune, in particular, that he could not get out of his head. Played by the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, it had been the number one song in America for the past five weeks:

He had been walking for about fifteen minutes, and had covered just under half a mile, when he spotted a group of three men holding a dark object in the surf, silhouetted against the misty sea. It was rare to run into anyone at this time of night: under the blackout regulations, everybody not in uniform was meant to be off the beach.

“Who are you?” Cullen yelled. 8He shined his flashlight in the direction of the strangers, but it was of little use in the fog, so he turned it off.

One of the men came toward him, shouting out a question.

“Coast Guard?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Fishermen. From East Hampton. We were trying to get to Montauk Point, but our boat ran aground. We’re waiting for the sunrise.”

“What do you mean, East Hampton and Montauk Point?” said Cullen, surprised that the fishermen would run aground less than five miles from their starting point and fifteen miles from their destination. Logically, they should be further out to sea. “Do you know where you are?”

The stranger acted cagey. “I don’t believe I know where we landed. You should know.”

“You’re in Amagansett. That’s my station over there,” the coastguardsman replied, gesturing back over his head through the mist. “Why don’t you come up to the station, and stay there for the night?”

The other man hesitated a little, before murmuring, “All right.” They walked together a few steps in the direction of the lifeboat station. Then the stranger changed his mind.

“I’m not going with you.”

“Why not?”

Another hesitation.

“I have no identification card, and no permit to fish.”

“That’s all right. You better come along.”

“No, I won’t go.”

Cullen made a motion to grab the stranger’s arm. “You have to come.”

Although the stranger spoke fluent English, he seemed strangely out of place. He didn’t look much like a fisherman. He was wearing a red woolen sweater with a zipper up the front, a gray mechanic’s coat, gray-green dungarees, white socks, tennis shoes, and a dark brown fedora hat. 9His pants, Cullen noticed, were dripping wet. The stranger seemed anxious to distract Cullen’s attention from his two companions. Rather than submit to the coastguardsman’s authority, he abruptly changed the subject.

“Now listen, how old are you, son?”

“Twenty-one.”

“You have a mother?”

“Yes.”

“A father?”

“Yes.”

“Look, I wouldn’t want to kill you. You don’t know what this is all about.”

The stranger reached into the left pocket of his pants and pulled out a tobacco pouch with a thick wad of bills.

“Forget about this and I will give you some money and you can have a good time.”

“I don’t want your money.”

Another man appeared out of the fog, from somewhere higher up the beach, wearing only a dripping bathing suit and a chain with some medallions around his neck. He was dragging a canvas bag, which was also wet, through the sand. “Clamshells,” said the man in the fedora hat by way of explanation. “We’ve been clamming.”

The newcomer began saying something in a language that Cullen could not understand but that sounded vaguely like the German he had heard in war movies. The use of the foreign language seemed to upset the man in the fedora. He immediately put his hand over the other man’s mouth, ordering him, in English, to shut up and “get back to the other guys.” He then took Cullen’s arm, saying, “Come over here.”

After a few steps, the stranger produced more money from the tobacco pouch, shoving what he said was three hundred dollars into Cullen’s hands. By now, Cullen was very worried. His life had been threatened, and he was outnumbered, at least four to one.

“Take a good look at my face,” said the stranger, removing his hat and coming closer. “Look in my eyes.”

The stranger’s eyes were dark brown, almost black. He was thin, and seemed to be about five feet six inches tall. He had unusually long arms, a large hooked nose, and prominent ears. His most noteworthy feature, apart from a thin, elongated face, was a streak of silvery gray that went through the middle of his combed-back black hair.

“Look in my eyes,” the stranger repeated. “Would you recognize me if you saw me again?”

“No sir, I never saw you before.”

“You might see me in East Hampton some time. Would you know me?”

“No, I never saw you before in my life.”

“You might hear from me again. My name is George John Davis. What’s your name, boy?”

It had been a bizarre conversation, and Cullen was not about to reveal his real name.

“Frank Collins, sir,” he mumbled.

With that, he backed away from the strangers, clutching the bills in his hand. The man in the fedora seemed willing to let him go, even though he and his companions could easily have overpowered him. Once Cullen reached the safety of the fog, he ran for his life.

IT TOOK Cullen no more than five minutes to run back to the lifeboat station. Most of his fellow coastguardsmen had gone to sleep; he woke them with shouts of “There are Germans on the beach” and “Let’s go.” Nervous and out of breath, he spilled out his story to his immediate boss, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Carl Jennett, an old salt who thought he had seen everything. Jennett had spent too much time responding to false alarms to believe his subordinate’s story immediately: it was not until Cullen produced the crumpled bills from his pocket that Jennett began to take him seriously. 10

Jennett opened up the storeroom, and handed out .30 caliber Springfield rifles and ammunition to his men, none of whom had handled firearms before. He loaded the rifles for Cullen and six others, put the safety catches on, and gave them a two-minute lesson in how to fire the guns. Before heading out the door, Jennett called the neighboring lifeboat station, six miles up the coast at Napeague, to alert them to what was going on.

Outside the station, the men saw a car coming down the road, its headlights dimmed to a narrow slit in accordance with the blackout regulations. Not knowing who was in the car, and thinking it might be headed toward the beach to pick up the Germans, Jennett and his men hid on the side of the road. But the car turned toward the lifeboat station. The passengers turned out to be two coastguardsmen returning from a party.

By the time they got back down to the place where Cullen had run into the man with the streak in his hair, it was close to 1 a.m., half an hour after the incident. 11They fanned out across the beach, combing the area carefully, but there was no sign of the strangers.

“Stay here while we search the dunes,” Jennett ordered, leaving Cullen at the spot where he had last seen the Germans. 12Two other coastguardsmen kept him company.

As they waited on the beach for the return of the others, Cullen and his companions caught whiffs of what smelled like burning diesel fumes wafting in from the sea. The fog was still very thick. But somewhere beyond the breaking waves, they could make out the silhouette of a long, low-lying boat that tapered down at each end, with a kind of deckhouse in the middle. A light blinked through the mist. Every few minutes, the boat would turn on its engines, as if attempting some kind of maneuver.