Gold From Crete (9 page)

‘Of course not,’ said the man across the desk. ‘And this will go on the air at eleven tomorrow morning.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said O’Connor, reaching for his hat.

‘It will be a clear night, Captain,’ said the admiral, coming up to the tiny bridge. ‘That’s the latest forecast.’

‘I wouldn’t object to a bit of haze myself, sir,’ said Crowe.

‘If you were in heaven,’ chuckled the admiral, ‘I’ll bet you’d say your crown didn’t fit and your harp was out of tune. But you must admit everything’s come off slicker than an eel in a barrel of grease. There’s the old
Peter Wilkes
, God bless her leaking hull, all dressed up in a coat of white paint and a big sign, DIPLOMAT on her side, lighted up like a Coney Island excursion boat, wallowing along ahead of us with that fake second funnel threatening to blow off any minute. And her loose screw is kicking up such a fuss that our listeners are going deaf. And here we are, seven of us, coasting along behind that makeshift
Frottingholm
, blacked out and with our men at battle stations. I only hope your hunch is right, Captain. I’d hate to lose that skeleton crew aboard the
Wilkes
. And I’d hate to have this whole expedition turn out to be a howler.’

‘It won’t,’ said Crowe, with an assurance he did not feel. Loewenstein hates Broening - always has. He knows if his former helmsman gets back to Berlin safely, Raeder is due to give him a naval command that would put him over Loewenstein. And Germany wants to break up Pan-American solidarity if she can. What better way than to have a U-boat sink a diplomatic ship and claim it was done by you Americans or we British? Loewenstein thinks he can kill two birds with one stone - getting rid of a personal enemy and staging a cause celebre at the same time. And he won’t torpedo that ship. He’s been told it’s without escort, so he’ll surface and shell - and machine-gun the lifeboats later, at his convenience.’

‘And the loose screw of the
Wilkes
,’ observed the admiral, ‘will prevent his listeners from knowing we’re in the neighbourhood.’

‘Right, sir.’

Crowe turned and looked back over the rigid line following behind him. He felt very happy at the imminent prospect of action. He was about to sing, when he remembered the presence of the admiral beside him. Admirals cramped one’s style in a manner especially noticeable to a captain whose rank usually made him monarch of all he surveyed.

‘Lord Jeffrey Amherst was a soldier of the King,’ sang the admiral, as if he were doing it just to rub in the difference in rank. Then he broke off.

‘You’ve no business here at all, you know.’

‘None, sir,’ agreed Crowe. ‘But I’m not the only one like that on board.’

‘Perhaps not,’ grinned the admiral.

The sun was down now and the darkness was increasing rapidly. The false-faced
Frottingholm
lurched and staggered in the rising seas, a boldly lighted figure on a darkening seascape. The destroyer which Crowe rode rose and fell to the long Atlantic rollers. The men were at the guns. Down below, there were men with earphones clamped over their heads, trying to pick out the sound of submarine engines beneath the howl of
Wilkes’
clattering screw. The ship, the whole little squadron, was keyed up, ready to explode into action. Somewhere in the darkness ahead was Loewenstein, rereading, perhaps, the information that had come to him that morning regarding the sailing of the
Frottingholm
with one August Broening aboard, the course and speed and destination of the diplomatic exchange ship. No one could be quite sure of how Loewenstein would act on that information, but everything that Crowe knew about him led the captain to believe he would attack on the surface, about midnight, with his prey silhouetted against a nearly level moon. And, Crowe hoped, Loewenstein would use his deck guns to carry away the radio antenna first, so that no radio operator could tell the world that a ship carrying Nazi diplomats was being sunk by a German sub.

As always in the navy on active service, action would be preceded by a long and tedious wait. Crowe had learned to wait - years and years of waiting had taught him how.

A bell rang at length, sharply, in the chartroom behind him.

The admiral was inside on the instant, and Crowe overheard a low-voiced dialogue between him and the ensign within. Then the white uniform of the admiral showed up again, ghostly in the dark.

‘They’re onto something,’ said the admiral. ‘Can’t get a bearing because of the ungodly noise that dressed-up hulk ahead is making. But I think your friend is in the neighbourhood.’

‘I hope he is,’ said Crowe. He was not merely hardened to waiting; he was-hardened to disappointment by now.

‘Yes,’ said the admiral. Crowe was making himself stand still, and was snobbishly proud of the fact that the admiral did not seem able to do the same. Faint through the darkness Crowe could hear him humming, under his breath, ‘Lord Jeffrey Amherst was a soldier of the King’.

Funny thing for an American admiral to be singing, Crowe told himself. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, he had never heard of him.

The bell rang again and yet again, and the information brought each time was more defined. Something on the port bow was moving steadily to intercept the
Wilkes
. And behind them rose the moon.

There was no chance at all of the squadron being surprised, but no one could tell just at which second the shock would come.

Somebody shouted. The gongs sounded. Crowe caught a fleeting glimpse of a long black shape breaching just off the side of the gaily lighted white hulk ahead. Then the guns broke into a roar, each report following the preceding one so closely as to make an almost continuous din. The flashes lit every part of the ship, dazzling the officers on the bridge. The destroyer was turning under full helm; not half a mile away there came a couple of answering flashes, lighting the sullen sea between. Then, as quickly as they had begun, the din and the flashes ceased. The little ship was leaping through the water now, the propeller turning at maximum speed, now that there was no need to deceive listeners at the instruments in the submarines. The squadron was spreading out fanwise in accordance with the drill so painfully learned during preceding years. Someone shouted another order, and the depth charges began to rain into the sea.

Then the destroyers wove together again and the last depth charges searched out the areas that had escaped the teeth of the comb in the first sweep. Reports were coming up from below in a steady stream. The little ship’s consorts were sending messages as well.

‘We hit two,’ said the admiral. ‘I saw the bursts.’

Crowe had seen them, too, but submarines have been known to survive direct hits from big shells. But if Loewenstein had been where he might have been expected to be, out watching the effect of his guns and the behaviour of his subordinates, there was every chance that one of the shells had killed him.

‘Only negative from down below,’ said the admiral.

The instruments probed the ocean depths unhampered, now that the Wilkes had cut her engines and was drifting. Reports said there was no trace of the solid bodies the instruments previously had contacted below the surface. Presumably, every submarine, torn open and rent asunder, had already sunk down into the freezing depths.

Crowe took the first full breath he had enjoyed since the admiral had flung his poser at him in the Navy Department office, days before. Now, he knew, the
Queen Anne
could make her run with relative security. Now he knew his hunch had been right: his hunch that Loewenstein would try to murder his helmsman, Broening.

The bell rang and some fresh information came up.

‘Some indication of something on the surface. These things are too sensitive, if that’s possible,’ said the admiral. ‘They tell you if a man spits over the side. This’ll be wreckage, I guess ... Listen!’ he said suddenly. There was a voice hailing them from the surface. ‘A survivor. One of the gun’s crew blown into the sea when our shells hit them.’

Survivors sometimes can give even better information than wreckage. They searched carefully in the faint light of the moon to find the man who was hailing them. And when they found him and hauled him on board, Crowe recognized the pug nose and the shape of the head even through the mask of oil. It was Korvettenkapitan Lothar Wolfgang von und zu Loewenstein.

Mr Austin Brewer unlocked his post-office box and ran hastily through his mail. Only the shortest glance was necessary, for there were three of the letters he was looking for, each of them easily identifiable by the big black-lettered labels gummed to them: ‘Opened by Examiner No 4378’. There was no need to read the superscription or look at the foreign stamps; in a year Mr Brewer had grown accustomed to receiving these letters. He did indeed glance at the backs of them, but even that was unnecessary, for he knew the handwriting so well. One letter was from Pilot Officer J. Brewer, 143rd Squadron, RAF, and the other two were from Pilot Officer H. Brewer of the same address. Jim and Harry wrote alternate weeks, and it was three weeks since the last mail had come.

Mr Brewer handled the letters a little longingly, and legally he was quite entitled to open them, for they were addressed to Mr and Mrs Austin Brewer, but he had more regard for Isabelle’s feelings than to open them; as soon as he reached home they would open them and read them together. At the thought of that he hurried back to his car.

The way home along the highway and the turning off onto the dirt road to the farm were familiar enough to him to think while he was driving. Three weeks was a long time to wait for letters from one’s sons; it was waits like this that rubbed it in about the difficulties caused by the German submarines. Mr Brewer knew well that he was indebted to the fact that his sons had joined the RAF for most of his knowledge of Europe and of the military situation there; otherwise he would never have expended so much diligent care on the reading of the communiques and the war correspondents’ accounts. It was to this reading, far more than to his sons’ letters, that he owed his knowledge.

Jim wrote better letters than Harry, but even Jim’s letters did not tell a great deal. Mr Brewer knew that the boys could say little about what they were doing, because they were engaged upon such important work that any description of it would involve revealing military secrets. But it was not only that; Mr Brewer was conscious of a more unsatisfactory deficiency - the boys had gradually come to take it for granted that he and Isabelle knew as much about England as they did, and that, of course, was by no means the case. Queer foreign expressions had begun to creep into their letters. Isabelle had comforted him by saying that they were only old-fashioned folk, just like a couple of hens who had hatched out ducklings, and had been surprised by their children’s new activities.

Mr Brewer sighed as he stopped the car outside the farm. Isabelle was there, the sun bright on her grey hair, and Mr Brewer climbed out as quickly as his rheumatism permitted.

‘There’re three letters,’ he said, the moment he was in earshot, and he saw the look on her face. The boys’ letters might indeed be unsatisfactory, but he knew (and he did not let Isabelle guess that he knew) that she lived only for the arrival of them.

Pilot Officer James Brewer, sitting in the Dispersal Room on standby duty, was conscious of the difficulty of writing a satisfactory letter to his parents. He got as far as ‘Dear Mother and Dad’. Then he sat drumming on his teeth with the end of his pen. Most of the things which interested him extremely either would not interest the old folks or could not be told.

The thing that occupied most of his thoughts at the moment, for instance, was that the squadron had just been equipped with the new Spitfires. Planes that embodied the lessons of a year and a half of life and death warfare, planes on which the safety of millions depended, planes which would affect the history and happiness of children to be born a century from now. Improved Spitfires were just beginning to come off the assembly lines, and the squadron was the first in the air force to be equipped with them.

It was something to be proud of, something he wanted to tell the world about; and he knew it was something that Jerry would be very glad to have positive information about. He would like to tell the old folks how the squadron had been trying the new planes out in formation flying, and how satisfactory the results had been - but there again was something Jerry would give a lot to know. He had been thinking about the new German plane that rumour said was in course of production, the Messerschmitt which would presumably be as great an improvement on the old as the new Spitfire was. The happiness of millions depended on the performance of the new Messerschmitt; he realized that the old folks would be more interested in it because his own life, and Harry’s life, might easily depend on it. But that only made a double reason why he could not write about it to them. And seeing that the new Spitfire and the prospect of the new Messerschmitt were all he had thought about for days now, it was terribly hard for him to find suitable topics for this letter he had to write. He looked round the room in a desperate search for inspiration.

Harry was larking with Johnny Coe. Lucky devils, for Harry had written last week’s letter and Johnny never wrote letters; apparently he had left behind in his native California not a single friend worth troubling about. Johnny with his red hair and freckles was the most carefree person Jim Brewer had ever known, as well as the most brilliant fighter pilot. Jim did not know whether the two qualities bore any relationship to each other. What mattered was that with Johnny on the tail of his section Brewer knew he had no need for anxiety. The three of them had flown in the same section for months now, and Brewer was solidly conscious that his section displayed perhaps the best teamwork in the squadron, which presumably meant in the world. When he put the deduction aside as petty he wondered, a little grimly, whether that was because he was a member of the RAF or because the English habit of self-depreciation had begun to get a hold on him.