Dark Voyage (34 page)

Kovacz translated the answer as “Please to keep them where they belong, from now on.”

“Tell him we will. And we mean it.”

“One missing,” Kovacz said.

“It’s Xanos, sir,” the AB said.

“What happened?”

“Press-ganged. We went looking for a bar and he wandered off, and they told us he’d been grabbed by seamen from one of the ships in port.”

“Stas, ask them if they can find our sailor.”

Kovacz tried. “They say they can’t. Can’t search all the ships. They regret.”

The marines went off, and DeHaan sent the crewmen back to the quarters. “If you leave this ship again,” he told them, “don’t come back.”

2040 hours. Port of Liepaja.

In the cabin, DeHaan and Maria Bromen waited. Tried to read, tried to talk, but they could hear the fighting now, south of the city, faint but steady, like a distant thunderstorm. A German reconnaissance plane flew high above the port and some of the gunners tried their luck but he was too far above the flak burst. Then the cruiser started up, with its heavy turret guns, the detonations echoing off the waterfront buildings.

“Who are they shooting at?” Maria Bromen said.

“Helping their army, trying to.”

“How far, then, the battle?”

“Big guns like that? Maybe five miles.”

“Not so far.”

“No.”

She rose from the bed and went to look out the porthole, at the dock and the city. “We are leaving soon, I think.”

“We are?”

She beckoned him to the porthole. There was an army truck parked by the gangway. The canvas top was turned back and a few soldiers were wrestling with a bulky shape, pushing it toward the tailgate, while others waited on the pier to ease it to the ground. After a moment, DeHaan saw that what they were fighting with was a grand piano. Too heavy—when the weight shifted, the piano dropped the last two feet onto the stone quay. One of the soldiers in the truck picked up a piano bench, shouted something, and tossed it to the others.

With a sigh, DeHaan went up to the deck, where Van Dyck and some of the crew had gathered to watch the show. “Where do you want it, Cap’n?” Van Dyck said.

“Forward hold. Get a sling on it, then cover it with canvas.”

The soldiers had apparently intended to carry the piano up the gangway, but Van Dyck waved them off, pointed to the cargo derricks, and the soldiers smiled and nodded.

DeHaan went back to the cabin.

“So now,” she said, “we go north.”

“The Russian officer said Tallinn, the naval base.”

“How far?”

“A day, twenty-four hours.”

“Well,” she said, “you warned me, in Lisbon.”

“Are you sorry, that you didn’t stay?”

She smoothed his hair. “No,” she said. “No. It’s better like this. Better to do what you want, and then what will happen will happen.”

“It may not be so bad, up there.”

“No, not too bad.”

“They’re at war now, and we are their allies.”

She smiled, her fingers touching his face. “You don’t know them,” she said. “You want to think it’s a good world.” She stood, started to unbutton the shirt. “For me, a shower. I don’t know what else to do.” Looking out the porthole, she said, “And for you—out there.”

On the pier a crowd, twenty or so, men and women, peering up at the ship and milling around their leader, a man with a dramatic beard, a fedora, a cape. Some of them carried suitcases, while others pushed wardrobe trunks on little wheels.

DeHaan grabbed his hat and said, “I’ll be back.”

By the time he reached the deck, the bearded man had already climbed the gangway. “Good evening,” he said to DeHaan, in English. “Is this the
Noordenstadt
?”

“The
Noordendam
.”

“It says
Santa Rosa
.”

“Even so, it’s the
Noordendam
.”

“Ah, good. We’re the Kiev.”

“Which is what?”

“The
Kiev
. The Kiev Ballet, the touring company. We are expected, no?”

DeHaan started to laugh and raised his hands, meaning he didn’t know a thing, and the bearded man relaxed. “Kherzhensky,” he said, extending a hand. “The impresario. And you are?”

“DeHaan, I’m the captain. Was that your piano?”

“We don’t have a piano, and the orchestra is on the
Burya,
the destroyer. Where do we go, Captain?”

“Anywhere you can find, Mr. Kherzhensky. Maybe the wardroom would be best, I’ll show you.”

Kherzhensky turned to the crowd of dancers and clapped his hands. “Come along now,” he said. “We’re going to a wardroom.”

Twenty minutes later, two companies of marines showed up, singing as they climbed the gangway. Then came a truckload of office furniture, and a Grosser Mercedes automobile with a stove in the backseat, then three naval lieutenants with wives and children, two dogs and two cats. The deputy mayor of Liepaja brought his mother, her maid, and a commissar. A dozen trunks followed, their loading supervised by two mustached men in suits who carried submachine guns. A family of Jews, the men in skullcaps, arrived in a Liepaja taxi. The driver parked his taxi and followed them up the gangway. There followed a generator, then six railway conductors, and four wives, with children. “They are coming,” one of the conductors said to DeHaan. He took off his hat, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. It was one in the morning when Shalakov arrived, looking very harassed, with his tie loosened. He found DeHaan on the bridge.

“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.

“It has to be you, Stas.” With passengers everywhere on deck there would be panic, chaos.

Kovacz grumbled, then said he would be up in a minute.

False alarm? Out on the bridge wing, an AB worked the
Noordendam
’s light, swinging it back and forth across an empty sky. Ratter was listening carefully to the distant drone, head cocked like a dog. “Are they circling us?”

DeHaan listened. Scheldt said, “That’s it, sir.”

At 10:20, Ratter said, “They’ve passed us by.”

“Going to hit Kronstadt,” DeHaan said.

“Or Leningrad.”

The others could hear it, their searchlights aimed forward of the
Burya
. “No,” DeHaan said. The sound swelled, east of them, then grew loud. From the radio room: “Attack will be . . .”