Dark Voyage (26 page)

Where it was all rather forthright, to begin with, but that didn’t last.

The
Noordendam
creaked and groaned in the night sea.
Much better than a room,
he thought, the rough blanket wound tight around them, the two of them wound tight around each other.

“They brought it aboard in Rangoon,” he said. “The last item in the shipment, a big wooden barrel. Some poor Englishman, they said, colonial administrator, going home to his family burial ground in England. They’d filled the barrel with brandy, you could smell it, to preserve the body. So we put it down in the hold but we had a bad storm, in the South China Sea, and it got stove in and began to leak. Well, we couldn’t leave it like that, not in high summer, so we opened it up and there he was, in his white tropical suit, along with some watertight metal boxes, packed with opium.”

“What did you
do
with it?”

“Overboard.”

“And him?”

“Got him a new barrel, an old paint drum, and filled it with turpentine.”

“I grew up in Sevastopol,” she said. “So I am Ukrainian, Marya Bromenko. ‘Maria Bromen’ came later. I thought, for Western journals, maybe better. Such ambition I had. My parents had great hopes for me—my father kept a little store in the port; tobacco, stamps, whatnot. For me he wanted education, not so easy but we managed. We managed, we managed—better than most. Always we had something on the table—potatoes, in the bad times, potato pancakes, in the good, as you can see.”

“See what?”

“I am big down below, not so much on top, a potato.”

He ran his fingers down her back. “Mm, not much like a potato.”

“I know you think so. I knew the first time I saw you, how you felt.”

“It showed?”

“To a woman, we know. But still, I was as I was, never to be a ballerina, and I hated the idea of becoming one more teacher. So, a journalist. I went to the university, in Moscow, for a year, but 1919, you know, the civil war, sometimes no class, or you had to march. And you had to say the right thing, because they would ask you about the other students, who’s a spy, and you had always provocation—‘Don’t you hate that bastard Lenin?’—and I got tired of it, weary, and afraid, and I thought, maybe better, go home to Sevastopol. I think I had, even then, a premonition, that I would get in trouble with these people.

“But my dear father wouldn’t give up—he got me a job, with a little journal we had there, news of the port and the ships. I worked hard, and eventually I found a good story, about the
Lieutenant Borri,
a French minesweeper that brought troops to Odessa, and her captain, one of those French adventurers who write novels. Claude Farrre, he was called, a villain, but interesting. It was this story that got me hired at
N’a Vakhte,
where, to begin with, I wrote from the woman’s view. What do you eat, on board your ship? Do you miss your sweetheart, at sea? Small stories, soft at the edge. Like Babel, though not so good, more like, maybe, Serebin. They are called
feuilletons,
leaves, that’s the technical name. You always had to put in a little communism—the food is better than under the czar, I miss my sweetheart but I am working to build socialism. We all did that, you learned how to do it, to keep the commissars quiet.” She yawned, then stretched.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “You have to work soon, no?”

“Not until midnight.”

“Must make you tired, to sleep in two parts.”

“You get used to it.”

“Still, I should let you sleep.”

“I have my whole life to sleep.”

When they were quiet, they could hear the wind sighing at the porthole and the rain beating down on the deck. “It’s a storm outside,” she said.

“Not too bad, just ocean weather.”

She yawned again, then moved around until she was comfortable. “Would you like to touch me a little?”

“Yes.”

15 June, 1810 hours. Off Glasgow.

DeHaan was in the chartroom when he heard the plane, the whine of a small engine passing above them, which faded away, then returned. He hurried up to the bridge wing, where a small biplane was circling back toward them in a cloudy sky. A two-seater, some kind of reconnaissance aircraft he didn’t recognize, with British insignia on the fuselage. Kees opened the bridge door and said, “He’s been signaling to us.”

“How?”

“Waving out the window, pointing to the foredeck.”

The plane passed over the bridge, flying so slowly that DeHaan wondered it didn’t stall. The pilot held something out the window, swooped low over the foredeck, dropped it on the hatch cover, then waved again as he flew away.

DeHaan and the watch AB went forward and recovered a zippered canvas bag. Inside, a chunk of kapok, that would have kept the bag afloat had it landed in the sea, and a sheaf of papers in a plastic envelope.

DeHaan took it back to the bridge. “What is it?” Kees said.

He wasn’t sure. Typed instructions, with courses and positions underlined, and routes between fields of tiny crosses marked out in red pencil. Finally he said, “Minefields. In the Skagerrak. It’s very precise.”

“Up-to-date,” Kees said.

“Looks like it.”

“So top secret—not even for the radio.”

“No, I don’t imagine they’d want anybody to know they have this.”

Kees studied the maps, then, with a tight smile, said, “You know, I just might lose my bet.”

“I think you might,” DeHaan said. “This gets us well beyond six-east.”

“Well, I won’t pay off just yet.”

“No, I wouldn’t, just yet.”

DeHaan called a senior officers’ meeting at eight, and Ratter, Kees, and Kovacz joined him in the wardroom. He chased Cornelius, cleaning up after dinner in the mess area, then laid out the minefield maps and routes on the table.

“What I wonder,” Ratter said, “is how we would do this if we were a real Spanish freighter.”

“By radio, once we were in the North Sea. That’s a guess, but I don’t think the
Kriegsmarine
gives out maps—not to neutrals.”

“Not many of them,” Kees said. “Only a few blockade runners. They aren’t led through, are they?”

“I don’t think so. There’s quite a lot of traffic up there, once you get past the Norwegian coast—Swedes down to Germany with iron ore, Norwegians and Danes, hauling all sorts of cargo. And however they do it, we’ll be in among them, just one more freighter.”

“Recognition signals?” Kovacz said.

“God I hope not. The British would’ve warned us, if there were. Could they do that? Every Argentine and Portuguese tramp going into the Baltic?”

Kovacz shrugged. “Hardly any go, like Kees said. British blockade maybe works better against Germany—they have to depend on Sweden, Russia, the Balkans.”

“That’s what Adolf always carried on about,” Ratter said. “Geography.”

“Nazi lies, Johannes,” Kovacz said. “It was always about
Wehrwille
and it still is.” It meant the will, the desire, to make war.

Leaning on his elbows and looking down at the maps, Ratter said, “They need this cargo, don’t they. Really need it.”

“I hope so,” DeHaan said.

“They need it all right,” Kovacz said. “For U-boats. For, ah, what’s the word,
signatures
. The British have direction-finding antennas everywhere—Iceland, Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Cape Town, other places, just look at a map and think it through. So they get all the signals, and plot positions on charts, and maybe make a kill, but this station, in Sweden, is for U-boats. Built in Kiel and Rostock, then tested, worked up, in the Baltic. Each radio operator is different, has his own signature, the way he uses the transmission key, so, once you recognize him, you can figure out which U-boat is where. What the NID wants to do is write the life story of each submarine, find out its number, maybe even the name of its commander. They want to watch it from its birth, at the Baltic yards, to its death. Because if U-123 is in the Indian Ocean, it isn’t on the Atlantic convoy routes.”

Ratter lit a cigarette and shook out the match. “Stas, how do you know all this?”

“When I was in the navy, in Poland, we had people at work on these things. The earth is four-fifths water, that’s a lot of room to hide, so the great trick of naval warfare has always been to find the enemy before he finds you. You’re finished, if you can’t do that, and all the courage and sacrifice in the world simply adds up to a lost war.”

North, and north. Into the heart of the storm on the evening of the sixteenth, where the wind shrieked and thirty-foot waves came crashing over the deck and sheets of driven rain sluiced down the bridge-house windows. It was DeHaan who took the storm watch, but Ratter and Kees were on and off the bridge all night long, everybody in oilskins, including the helmsman, hands white on the wheel, who stood a two-hour shift before DeHaan sent him below and had a fresh one take over. The force of the storm blew out of the west, and DeHaan kept giving up a grudging point at a time, fighting for his course, because
Noordendam
couldn’t take it full on the beam. Finally Kees said, “Turn into the goddamn thing for Christ’s sake,” and DeHaan gave the order, swinging due west and heading up into the wind. Mr. Ali came up, now and again, blinking as he wiped his glasses with a handkerchief, to report distress calls coming in on the radio—the North Atlantic taking hold of the war that night and trying to break it in half. Then a savage gust of wind snapped the aerial and Ali appeared no more.

It backed off, the morning of the seventeenth, with a violent red-streaked dawn, and DeHaan staggered down to his cabin, stripped off his clothes, and crawled into bed. He woke, some time later, to find something soft and warm in there with him, and spent a few seconds being exceptionally happy about that before he fell back asleep. Woke again, alone this time, he thought, until he came up from under the blanket and saw her standing at the porthole and gazing out. He watched her till she felt it and turned around, wiping her eyes. “You are looking at me,” she said.

“I am.”

“Well then,” she said. And came back to join him.

They were a day and a half late, steaming up past the Hebrides and swinging around the Orkney Islands into the North Sea, but there was still time to reach the Smygehuk by the twenty-first, as long as the weather held fair. Which it did, but for a series of line squalls in the wake of the storm that neither DeHaan nor the
Noordendam
took very seriously. These had been busy sea-lanes before the war, but no longer—only a few fishing boats, a British destroyer in the distance, a corvette that came up on their starboard beam and stayed         with them for twenty minutes, then found something better to         do. They were alone after that, in choppy gray waters, cold and grim, running south-southeast between Britain and Norway, with the Skagerrak, portal to the German Empire, lying some twelve hours to the east.

At dusk, DeHaan took a commander’s tour around the ship—a campfire-to-campfire, night-before-the-battle tour. Slow and easy, with all the time in the world, he stopped to smoke a North State with some off-watch ABs, had a salt-beef sandwich and cold tea in the crew’s mess, sat on a bench in the workshop that adjoined the engine room and chatted with the oilers and firemen. He grew prouder of his crew as the evening wore on—there was none of the usual griping and bitching, no tales of thievery or fistfights. Nothing quite like danger, he thought, to cure the bullshit of daily life.

He took Amado aside and told him he might be on stage once more, in the coming days. He asked Van Dyck if he could rig a communication line from the bridge to the radio room, and Van Dyck said he could, using spares kept on hand for the bridge/engine-room system. “It’ll look like hell,” the bosun said. “Tube running down the helm and across the deck.”

“Do it anyhow,” DeHaan told him.

He visited with Shtern, in a former storage locker, heavily whitewashed and made over into an infirmary, a red cross painted on the door, and finally with S. Kolb, found reading in the wardroom.

“Good book, Herr Kolb?”

Kolb held the spine up for DeHaan to see. H. Kretschmayr,
Geschichte von Venedig
. “A history of Venice,” he said. “I found it at my hotel in Lisbon.”

“Wars and trading fleets?”

“Doges.”

In those hats.

“It goes only to 1895,” Kolb said. “But maybe that’s not so bad.”

“We will be entering German waters, tonight,” DeHaan said. “I thought I’d let you know.”

“Am I to be assigned—an action station?”

DeHaan was diplomatic. “We don’t expect to be doing very much fighting, Herr Kolb, but, if something happens, we know where to find you.”

“I can work a radio, sir.”

I bet you can.
“Oh? Well, we’ll keep that in mind.”

Ratter shot starsights at 2100 hours, and calculated they would cross a line parallel to Stavanger, Norway—six degrees east longitude—not long after midnight. “Their front door,” he said.

“Yes, if we’re going to be stopped, it will happen there.”

“Ship dark? In midstream?”

“No, all lit up, and six off the Norwegian coast.”

At 0018 hours, on 20 June, 1941, the NV
Noordendam
entered German-occupied Europe, curving around a welcoming minefield that served, on this sea border, as barbed wire. DeHaan noted it in the log with particular care, because he sensed they would not be coming out. A dark shore, to the north. Blacked out. No lighthouses, no lightships, no bells or horns or signal buoys—none of the navigational apparatus that had helped mariners find their way for centuries. Still, with nothing more than a sickle moon, it should have been like any night sea voyage—ship’s bells on the half hour, engine full ahead, wake churning behind them—but it wasn’t, because whatever was watching and waiting out there could be felt.
Calm down,
DeHaan told himself, but it didn’t help, and Ruysdal, beside him at the helm, wasn’t doing much better. “Bearing zero nine five, Cap’n,” he said, for absolutely no reason.