Rogue Raider (7 page)

Von Mueller watched from the bridge, sipping milkless lapsang soochong from a paper-thin cup and matching saucer. The men had been good and loyal, had borne danger and deprivation with courage. They must receive their due in the only language they understood, the things of the senses, and must have their fill of laughter, cognac and greasy sausage. He regretted only that he had no women to issue them and that bitter masturbation and those informal practices to which the navy turned a blind eye must for the moment suffice. Dr Schwabe was down there pursuing one of the ratings who had slipped on a bright female kimono, trying desperately to get down an account of his childhood as he waltzed around the deck to screams and catcalls. Von Mueller smiled wanly upon him as upon them all. But every minute spent here was dangerous. A British dreadnought could come over the horizon at any second and catch them napping. There must now be an emotional purgation. He called action stations.

To deliberately sink a ship is a terrible thing. They had been trained to think of themselves as fearless stalkers and hunters of wild beasts but to destroy a captured ship was more like beating a placid cow on the head with an iron bar until it died. The seacocks on the
Indus
were brutally smashed so that water shot into engine room and bunkers in great grey geysers. As soon as the scuttling crew had themselves scuttled clear, the forward gunners coldly pumped six shells into the vessel. A terrible hush fell over the spectators lining the rails of the little fleet, suddenly horribly sober. The
Indus
shivered as though with a spasm of sudden internal agony, steadied and settled a little lower in the water. Then, as the crew watched in suspense, she seemed to fight for life, showing a terrible will to survive her implacable fate. As the minutes ticked by, little by little, she started slipping down, accelerating as she went, gulping down great final draughts through hatchways and stairs and coughing them back out through open portholes. With a groan she twisted on her side and blew huge gouts of filthy oil through the ventilation shafts like a dying whale and the funnels screamed as they were torn apart and rushed to the bottom in a terrible whirlpool. When it seemed that nothing was left but a monstrous vat of boiling water, mighty beams, ripped loose in the depths, shot up in the air and crashed back into the sea and a terrible funereal belch.roared up from the abyss to envelope them in a rank stench of gross decay. Lastly, the lifeboats surfaced, righted themselves correctly according to design, and bobbed cheerfully in the sun. They would give away the fate of the vessel so the
Emden
tried to run them down like puppies in the road. They swept playfully out of the way, twinkled their sterns and floated happily off towards India. Never mind. They would not be found for several days. The
Emden, Pontoporos
and
Markomannia
turned and sailed on towards Calcutta. The captain of the
Indus
stood on the deck and wept openly and without shame. It sent a shiver up every seaman's spine.

The next day they sank the
Lovat
, another troop transport. The crew were courteously allowed time to gather their personal effects before being installed on the junkman. Just off Calcutta, perilously close to the harbour entrance, they took the
Kabinga
, carrying British goods to North America. In fact, they were so close to land that they mistook a temple stupa in Puri for a ship and steamed towards it. Lauterbach had never been one of the world's great navigators and now he was the butt of shipboard humour with lookouts spotting the Brandenburg gate and the Eiffel tower in mid ocean. The
Kabinga
's goods were deemed neutral so that the ship could not be sunk. Lauterbach rebuked his own crass sentimentality – the master had his wife and child on board – for settling for only a very small sweetener to explain to von Mueller the need to spare the vessel.

Then they took the
Killin.
More foul Indian coal, unwanted, so she would be sent straight to the bottom. The morning was ended with a pleasant lunch, the officers playing bridge or sitting in Lauterbach's easy chairs thumbing Lauterbach's books – young von Guerard, – himself the ship's pet – tousled, unshaven, giggling in delicious agony at the kittens boiling in his lap and poking their tiny claws through the thin stuff of his uniform and into his thighs. Their fur had already added itself as the latest crust on the sticky green paint.

“We have given them names Juli-bumm. Ah! Eee! They are Pontoporos, Indus, and so on – one for each of the ships we have sunk. What do you think?”

“Find more cats,” growled Lauterbach.

Then the brand-new
Diplomat
, smelling of paint and full of costly imperial tea, the apoplectic British captain outraged that they would not porter across his golf clubs, sporting trophies and Indian curios. Lauterbach disliked his braying, patrician tone of voice, that transported him back to the childhood days of tight-arsed respectable relatives. They would all go to the bottom and the captain with them if he had his way. Yet part of him was endlessly intrigued by the bizarre objects by which people defined their own identities, the things they prized and wanted to save. Portraits of wives and children, of course, but there had been a man aboard the
Indus
who brought only a pair of knitted mittens and several gnarled old tars came aboard tenderly clutching debauched teddy bears. He would mention it to Schwabe.

Then a neutral Italian ship that was allowed on its way but hastened to improperly denounce the
Emden's
position to the British authorities. Why? Lauterbach had always liked Italians. He had never done them any harm. Shipping in the area was promptly suspended and five British and Japanese cruisers were called out in emergency to search for them. The Italian captain, they heard later, was given a gold watch and chain by the grateful British.

They headed east, culling the
Trabboch
on the way, and finally released the
Kabinga
, now crowded with prisoners, to return to India. As they were freed, the captive crews crowded the rails and stared at them.

“What are they doing?” asked von Muecke, nervously. “Are they going to try to board us? This is madness. Shoot anyone who attempts to approach the side.” Then …

“Hip, hip hooray!” Caps were tossed in the air, smiles waves. They were giving their astonished German captors three hearty cheers. In captured newspapers, the crew would now begin to see a legend take form that would cast the
Emden
, and more particularly von Mueller, as exponents of a gentlemanly and courteous kind of warfare that marked a return to the rules of knightly chivalry and was totally at odds with the emerging horrors of the Flanders trenches. The squalour and despair of the land war had led to a contempt for life that often included one's own, so that only in the air and at sea did conditions allow men to retain that sense of self-worth that bred humane behaviour and honour-governed, gladiatorial combat. It was, naturally, von Mueller's high aristocratic principles that received all the credit for this. The Germans, it seemed, were fighting to preserve British values.

Lauterbach smiled to himself, the latest newspaper from a victim vessel across his knee. It was full of the doings of the
Emden
and threw around words like “sportsman” and “fair play,” “gallantry” and “gentleman of war” as if war were a genteel match of golf but, as a man of the material world, Lauterbach knew such abstract virtue rested squarely on the abundant supplies delivered by his own astute looting. It was his low purpose rather than their high principle that kept this ship afloat. He folded the paper and bent to enjoy a plate of puffed-up, high-principled Apfelstrudel, conjured up specially for him by the cook to whom he had given looted British flour and base grease.

“Mmm. Just the way I like it.” He tongued through the outer carapace. “… dry and rough to on the outside and smooth, moist and sticky within.”

He opened his eyes to see Schwabe looking at him excitedly, notebook irritatingly poised, pencil ready-licked for the taking of notes. Lauterbach glimpsed odd little sketches in the margins and thought of that of Turpitz in the heads. Surely he could not be the artist? It was an intriguing thought. Her would return to it in moments of contemplation in the latrines. Before Schwabe could say anything, Lauterbach struck first.

“Tell me Schwabe. What does your Dr Freud say on the subject of people who lick the tips of their pencils?”

“Er. Well …” He stowed it rapidly away, blushing.

“Have you read this?” Lauterbach chuckled, swallowing dabbed-up crumbs, ostentatiously finger-licking and flourishing the paper in a great paw. “‘There is no doubt that the German cruiser
Emden
had knowledge that the
Indus
was carrying 150 cases of North-West Soap Company's celebrated ELYSIUM Soap, and hence the pursuit. The men on the
Emden
and their clothes are now clean and sweet, thanks to ELYSIUM Soap. Try it!' They are using us to sell soap to Indians.”

But an attentive eye would have seen that Lauterbach's tunic, taut now over his swelling paunch, unlike those of his slim fellow-officers, was not just clean and sweet. It was discreetly starched at cuffs and collar and the buttons were hand-burnished. Before delivery, the top pocket had received a final dressing of four chinking silver dollars, half the pay of non-existant Number One Washboy. Lauterbach felt he was finally beginning to get the measure of His Imperial Majesty's navy.

He felt breath on his neck and turned to see von Muecke reading, incredulous, over his shoulder. “We are the most popular ship in the Indian Ocean even though we are their enemies. The English are truly mad.” Von Muecke, headshaking. “They speak of our campaign as if we were shoppers.”

“Ah, yes, Number One, but not just ordinary shoppers. We are at least carriage-trade.”

But the water in these latitudes was getting too hot for comfort and they would head south for a coaling in the remote Andamans, peopled by neutrally hostile aborigines who fired their arrows at all visitors with an easy indifference to nationality. On the way they picked up the
Clan Matheson
, more by habit than design. She made the mistake of running before them and they chased her as unreflectingly as a dog does a fleeing cat.

“Are you English?” they called across.

“Scottish, damn and blast ye.”

Von Mueller was crisply punitive. “For failure to comply at once with my orders, the vessel shall be sunk immediately.”

The cathedral-like holds were an echoing treasurehouse of rich and useless manufactures, luxury cars, typewriters, locomotives that gleamed silently in the dark. Lauterbach stroked the sleek Rolls Royces in quiet reproach, then kicked their tyres in a mixture of respect and vandalism. He was a sword of austerity from the desert, a punisher of the sin of pride and all this vanity was born but to die. But wait, what was this? In a well-strawed stall two nervous and immaculate racehorses thudded their hooves on the planking. Lauterbach considered them in horror and confusion. Never had he seen creatures of such impractical beauty, pared and delicate, uncompromisingly aristocratic. Compared to their sinuous lines and rippling flanks, the boxy Rolls Royces were merely cheap tin toys. He looked into those great liquid eyes and could not bear to think of their terror at an invading wall of cold, hard water surging towards them. If they had been women he would have mounted them, ridden them hard, forced and whipped them over the fences of his pleasure and they would have loved him for it.

“Lieutenant Schall, shoot the horses.”

He went about his business on the upper decks, evacuating the crew, checking the contents of the captain's safe, pocketing up any useful dollars, trying to block out from his thoughts the inevitable shots that his ears were straining for and it was not until they were embarking in the boats, the explosive charges already set to blow the ship apart, that he asked again whether it had been done.

“Sorry, Juli-bumm. I just couldn't.”

He climbed back aboard, padded quietly to their stall and shot them down with a single bullet each to the brain, as he kissed their hot foreheads with pure, sad love. They shuddered and died at his fatal lips. It was the first shot he had fired in the war – they the first casualties of the campaign. Barely had their boat cleared the ship, when the charges went off and blew a huge steel plate clanging over their heads. By the time they made it back to the
Emden
, the
Clan Matheson
was already taking its proud cargo swirling to the bottom.

Von Muecke showed an unexpected gift for stand-up comedy. A ship at sea is a closed, incestuous community, a sweating mobile factory of love, hate and rumour. Newspapers from captive vessels were sent straight to the bridge as a useful resource. But there was a fear also that access to the propaganda put about by the enemy, for the consumption of their Indian subjects, might unsettle the men. Von Muecke knew that the wildest tales were circulating. It was time to sink them with a few well-placed charges.

He adopted the tactic of reading to the men totally contradictory accounts of the same events from different papers and the more deadly serious he was, the funnier it became. He read out descriptions of their own sinking and imaginary exploits that placed them firmly anywhere from Rangoon to Australia. He reduced them to tears of laughter with stories of simultaneous naval battles with the rest of their squadron in parts of the world they had never even visited. He totted up the casualty figures on the European front and proved that twice the population of Germany had allegedly perished there already. Best of all was a composite picture of British plans for the Reich after their victory. It was a vision of home with the Reich collapsed, penitent generals shooting themselves by battalions and the complete colonial dismemberment of Germany with Bavaria independent and only Thuringia being left intact. The Thuringian stokers rose spontaneously and stalked and pranced up and down arrogantly, as the only true Germans, before these contemptible new foreigners.