The Lonely Sea

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘The lapse of nine years and the fact that the war is over doesn’t make treason any less heinous a crime.’ I didn’t bother to lower my voice. ‘As for the drink, not with you, Ravallo. I’ll get my own.’

  Something was badly out of focus—I needed time to think. I turned to push my way to the bar through the knot of people crowding round.

  Ravallo caught my arm. He was immensely strong.

  ‘Same as Civitavecchia, eh, Mac?’ he asked softly. ‘Still the same jury, judge and executioner. Is that it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said evenly. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘And I’m the condemned man?’

  ‘You’re the condemned man.’

  ‘A last favour, then.’ His voice was very low. ‘It’s my privilege.’

  Something about him, about his voice, his eyes, his desperate sincerity caught me. Not even Spencer Tracy was that good. For the first time I knew doubt.

  I followed him slowly back to his table and sat down. The curious crowd gradually melted away.

  ‘Well, I’m listening.’

  ‘You don’t even have to do that, Mac,’ he said smilingly. ‘Just read these.’

  Carefully he placed two documents on the table and smoothed them out. After some hesitation, I picked one up.

  It was a transcript from the US Navy Records Office. It had been made in the Pentagon and ran as follows:

  Leading Signalman Georges Passière, Official

  No P/JX 282131.

  A body, dressed in Royal Naval tropical kit, was found on the beach, fourteen miles South of Civitavecchia. 16 May, 1944.

  Identified as above rating by identity disc.

  Secret lining discovered in flap of belt pouch. Oilskin envelope. List of thirty transmitting and receiving station wavelengths: VHF (very high frequency): mainly short-range. Six positively identified as German: remainder unknown.

  Slowly, ever so slowly, I laid the document on the table. I was dimly aware of a waiter by my side, and a tray of glasses. Automatically, unseeingly almost, I picked up a glass with one hand, the remaining document with the other.

  Deutscher Geheimdienst.

  German Counter-Intelligence Records captured Turin.

  Decoded Naples, October 1944.

  Luigi Metastasio: Born Rome 1919.

  (Then followed an account of Metastasio’s school life, civilian employment, Fascist indoctrination, army service, counter-intelligence training.) Speaks French, German and English fluently: smuggled into France April 1940, German-occupied France August 1940, thence to Fecamp: fishing boat to England. Accepted Portsmouth barracks May, 1941: qualified telegraphist.

  The rest was unimportant—and I knew the last line before I read it.

  Assumed name—Georges Passière.

  I placed this report on the other and gazed at it as though hypnotized. I said nothing—I couldn’t say anything. Neither thoughts nor words would come. My mind seemed to have stopped. I felt beaten, empty, sick—and hopelessly confused.

  Nicky was merciful, infinitely so. I hardly heard his voice at first.

  ‘It was a sweet racket, Mac. The beauty of the short-range receiver.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Sure the Germans couldn’t monitor our agents’ radio messages. By the same paradigm we couldn’t monitor Passière’s short-range reports, probably relayed back immediately afterwards to German and Italian listening posts. The massacred Partisans, the butchery of the Rangers and the Commandos, the capture of our agents, the tip-off at Passero—all friend Passière’s work.’

  ‘And—and Stella?’ With a great effort I forced the words out. My mind was working again and the realization, stark and unforgiving, of what I had done these long years ago now smashed home like a hammer blow.

  I answered my own question, my voice an unbelieving whisper.

  ‘Passière! That’s how Stella went, Nicky. It must have been. Passière! I, I took Passière into my confidence. Nicky—I told him everything!’

  ‘Yeah,’ murmured Nicky quietly. I thought it had to be something like that. If he knew she was finished, no more use to him, he would try to tip them off, wouldn’t he?’

  Maybe Nicky didn’t stop there. Maybe he went on talking. I don’t know. All I know is that his voice, quiet and level and kind, died away in my ear. I couldn’t hear Nicky any longer. I couldn’t even look at him. I knew I should be apologizing, saying something about never forgiving myself—but I knew that this lay outwith the reach of words.

  ‘I sold her down the river. I threw her to the wolves,’ I said dully. ‘I did that. Nobody else, Nicky, only me. Just me.’ I buried my head in my hands.

  I knew a hundred pairs of eyes were on me and I didn’t care. The lounge had gone very quiet. The seconds—each one an eternity of self-loathing, of bitterness, of despair—ticked slowly by. Slowly, terribly slowly.

  Suddenly, petrifyingly, a pair of soft hands clasped gently over my eyes and a well-remem-bered voice, husky with emotion, whispered com-passionately:

  ‘Enough is enough, Nicky. Hullo, Mac, darling.’

  For four or five dazed, reeling, unbelieving seconds I sat motionless. Then I leapt to my feet, swung round, knocked several glasses crashing to the floor—the ritzy clientele of the Savoy were certainly getting their money’s worth tonight—and faced Stella.

  Stella! For a moment I could say nothing. I could only stand and look—and look. She stood there, dark and lovely and smiling, the old Stella of the Malta days—only, there were tears in her eyes now.

  Then I grabbed her. I hugged her till she cried for mercy. Finally, I kissed her.

  The gallery hadn’t missed a thing. They were right on the ball and this was their cue. We sat down to a storm of hand-clapping.

  ‘And they didn’t get you after all?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Why should they have?’ she smiled.

  ‘Passière faked her message,’ Nicky explained. ‘There was no MMR, no armoured car. When he jumped up, he must have knocked off the receiving switch. He’d hoped we would go after her and then he’d contact his pals and they’d get the lot of us. Only, it didn’t quite work out that way. You came back and his own pals—the guy in the Heinkel—contacted him first.’

  ‘Nicky picked me up that night,’ Stella went on. ‘He told me what had happened—about the sinking of the 149. I cried. Didn’t I, Nicky? I cried all night. I’m a fearful crybaby, really. Very secondrate spy material.’ She dabbed her eyes with a tiny square of lace.

  I smiled and turned to Nicky.

  ‘So you looked Stella up after the war? Is that it?’

  He grinned. ‘Well, in a way.’

  I looked at the rings on her left hand.

  ‘So then,’ I continued morosely, ‘I suppose you got married?’

  Stella smiled. ‘Well, no, not exactly. You see, we always were—1938, to be precise!’

  My nervous system couldn’t take much more. I’d just about used up all my reactions. I just sat there half-stunned, conscious that my face was turning a bright and glowing crimson.

  ‘Sorry, Mac.’ Nicky was apologetic. ‘Couldn’t even tell you. Had anyone known—our side, their side—our usefulness would have been at an end. We would have been a menace to our own people. I told you, Mac, often. You can’t give hostages to fortune.’

  Slowly, it all came back to me. I could see it all now and cursed myself for my blindness.

  Their overdone casualness and offhandedness towards each other. The constant bickering, yet the unswerving loyalty and belief in each other—how familylike, I thought with chagrin. Nicky’s strange behaviour when I suggested I might fall for her (I squirmed at that thought). His anger when I expressed distaste for her spying. The secret holding of hands. His increasingly haggard and worried appearance—God, I thought, how would I have felt if my wife had been in that position. Finally, his desperate eagerness to rescue her—strictly in defiance of all Special Service orders and, as far as he had known at the time, in the face of certain capture or death.

  Wit
hout a word I pushed my chair away from the table and rose carefully to my feet. Slowly my leg came back and deliberately, and with great accuracy, I kicked myself.

  The gallery, first-nighters to a man and obviously trained to a hair, applauded with great fervour. And as I sat down, I realized that the unbridled enthusiasm of the audience wasn’t entirely on my behalf.

  Laughter and tears and love walk always hand in hand. Stella and Nicky were kissing each other with a most unEnglish lack of restraint. They looked for all the world like a pair of newly-weds.

  Which for me, of course, was exactly what they were.

  The Jervis Bay

  The second year of the war, as dark and sombre a year as Britain had ever known, was drawing steadily to its dark and sombre close. November, 1940, and behind lay the long agonizing months of hardship and suffering and crushing defeat, abandonment by our last allies in Europe, the wanton destruction of our cities and towns and thousands upon thousands of civilians, of the never-ending and always imminent threat of invasion by a ruthless and implacable enemy who would be content with nothing short of the annihilation of our country as an entity and a nation.

  True, the crushing defeat was a thing of the past, albeit of the recent past: Hitler’s all-conquering Panzer divisions had swept us out of Europe and only a miracle had spared the survivors who had found their way to the desolate beaches of Dunkirk. The collapse of France, also, was long an accomplished fact, and we had at least and at last the satisfaction of knowing precisely where we stood—alone.

  But the Battle of Britain was still with us. Night after night, through the lengthening hours of darkness of October and November, the Luftwaffe’s heavy bombers, seldom less than two hundred at a time, droned over our ports and cities and unloaded their cargoes indiscriminately over docks, factories and homes—but principally over homes. And the threat of invasion, the launching of the longawaited operation ‘Sealion’ against our shores, was a looming peril that might at any hour of the night or day explode into devastating reality.

  Britain, in that dark hour, was exactly in the position of a beleaguered garrison the remnants of whose army, all but destroyed in the field, have taken refuge behind the walls and barred the gates. But beleaguered garrisons can fall, and invariably do fall, if fear and despair destroy the will to survive or if constant attrition weakens the defenders to the point where continued defence and defiance becomes a physical impossibility, but most surely of all, they can be inexorably starved into surrender.

  There was nothing to fear on the first score. Defiance burned like a flame, and with pikes, clubs and home-made petrol bombs the people of Britain were prepared to follow Churchill’s injunction to fight for every beach and street and village in the country. But starvation and attrition was another matter altogether.

  We had to have food or die. We had to have minerals and metals and chemicals for the manufacture of tanks and weapons for our weaponless armies, we had to have oil for the naval ships that guarded the shores, for the factories and the power stations, for the manufacture of petrol enough to keep in the air the handful of Hurricanes and Spitfires that alone stood between us and the savagery of the Luftwaffe.

  The food, the oil and many of the most essential raw materials had to be imported into this beleaguered garrison; and there was only one way by which these could come—the sea. A garrison without any hope of relief, we were utterly dependent on the merchant ships that sailed upon this sea as our only remaining lifeline to the world that lay beyond. But lifelines can be cut. The Germans knew this as well as anyone.

  They spared no effort to cut these lifelines, once and for all. Sabotage in foreign ports, bomber attacks above the sea, E-boats on the sea, U-boats under the sea—they threw in every weapon they possessed. But, at that time, their most deadly and devastating weapon of all was the raider—heavy cruisers and pocket battleships, big fast and powerful vessels that could be stopped by nothing less than a battleship of the line. An armed raider let loose among a convoy was prelude to a merciless and inevitable slaughter—the Hipper, for instance, had once fallen upon a defenceless convoy and sent eleven merchant ships to the bottom in less than an hour.

  And now, with the collapse of France and the fall of Norway offering the enemy a thousand miles of Atlantic seaboard as operating base, and with the advent of winter storms and long winter nights affording almost unlimited opportunity to break out into the Atlantic, the menace had reached critical proportions. The raiders, with almost complete freedom of operation, sailed where they liked, struck where they chose and sank with impunity.

  This impunity could have been removed, risks halved and effective counter-measures doubled if we had had bases nearer the scene of action: the country at large, no less than the Admiralty, was convinced of this. The use of certain ports in Southern Ireland, would have moved our outposts far west into the Atlantic, and the advantages gained, the scores of ships and thousands of lives saved, could have made all the difference between life and death. But Southern Ireland wasn’t interested in the life or death of its neighbour (officially, that is—it would be most unfair to forget that thousands of its citizens volunteered for and served with distinction in our armed forces during the war) and categorically denied us the use of any port in Ireland. Far from offering us help in these, our darkest days, they were prepared to stand aside while the German raiders cut our lifeline to the outer world and brought us to defeat.

  In Britain, in the latter half of 1940, the feeling against Ireland was intense: so it was particularly fitting that it should be an Irishman, Captain Edward Fogarty Fegen, who was to light the beacon of hope in the darkness, who was to show that we could live in spite of the lack of bases, that a convoy could survive even the savagery of a fullscale assault by a pocket battleship…Provided, of course, that there was always a Fegen to stand between the convoy and the enemy.

  It was the evening of 5 November, 1940, and Convoy HX 84, in latitude 52° 45′ North, longitude 32° 13′ West—the very heart of the Atlantic—was steaming steadily, peacefully home to England. The sky was a cloudless blue: visibility was exceptional: light airs blew gently out of the south-east and the setting sun glittered across the burnished gold of a sea calm and quiet and smooth as the Atlantic almost never is.

  In nine parallel lines, the big convoy slowly zigzagged its way across the broad face of the Atlantic. Thirty-seven ships there were in all in this convoy—including eleven tankers—and the total value of its cargoes of food and machinery and oil quite beyond computation. Millions of pounds, many millions of pounds, but then the value was not to be reckoned in terms of money but in terms of the lives of those who sailed the cargoes home from Halifax, in the lives and the freedom of those who so eagerly awaited these desperately needed supplies.

  Among these thirty-seven ships there were some which, for one reason or another, took the attention and the eye more often than the others. The New Zealand Rangitiki, for instance, 17,000 tons and the largest ship in the convoy: the Puck, at the other end of the scale, a tiny 1,000 ton vessel that had no business at all on those great waters: or the Cornish City, wearing the flag of the Convoy Commodore, Rear-Admiral Maltby. These caught the eye, and one or two others: but certainly no one paid much attention to two ships destined for a fame that has diminished but little with the passing of the years—the tanker San Demetrio, London and the Swedish motor vessel Stureholm, Gothenburg—or to the third, sailing steadily east and into immortality, the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay.

  The Jervis Bay, the sole guardian and escort of all these ships, was in the middle of the convoy. Neither in appearance nor in fact was she calculated to inspire any confidence at all among the vessels she was supposed to protect. She was big—14,000 tons—but in war size counts for little. What mattered was that she was old—built in 1922—vulnerable, unarmoured, and equipped with only a handful of worn, weak and inaccurate 6-inch guns, twice as old as the Jervis Bay herself: as a man of war, as a fighting ship, she had nothing:
but then again she had everything—she had Captain Fogarty Fegen.

  Captain Fegen, a big, tough, 47 year-old bachelor Irishman, son of an admiral, grandson of a captain, already twice decorated for his gallantry, was in his usual position on the bridge when a ship was sighted far to the north, hull-down over the smooth, unbroken horizon. That ship had no business to be there, and at once the challenge started flickering out from the Aldis lamp on the bridge of the Jervis Bay.

  The stranger made no reply, but kept steaming at high speed towards the convoy. A second challenge went out. That, too, went unanswered. Then a third—but after the third there was no need for more. Fegen had her now. The fox was in among the chickens.

  It was the 10,000 ton, 30-knot pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, a powerful, heavily armoured raider equipped with six 11-inch guns of a phenomenal range, and a secondary armament of eight 5.9-inch guns. Only a Nelson, a Rodney or a Hood could have stopped her with certainty—nothing else. She was a killer against whom there was no defence and her helpless victims could only lie there waiting for her, waiting for the inevitable execution: her hull was heaving over the horizon now, and HX 84 could see the setting sun striking golden glints off the white waters piled high at her bow as she raced south under the maximum power of her great engines.

  ‘Action Station’ bells sounded aboard the Jervis Bay as the signal to the convoy fluttered up to her yardarm—‘Prepare to scatter’. Almost at the same moment, Rear-Admiral Maltby on the Cornish City gave the order for an emergency turn to starboard, away from the enemy: at once all the ships in the convoy heeled far over to port as they broke south-east under cover of a smoke screen.

  All the ships—except one. The biggest smoke screen ever laid, Captain Fegen realized grimly, wasn’t going to make the slightest difference to the Admiral Scheer. She would slice through that swirling curtain of smoke as if it didn’t exist, pursue and cut the fleeing convoy to pieces. Smoke was not enough: the convoy had to have time, time to scatter and lose themselves in the great wastes of the Atlantic, time to wait for the protective blanket of night…Fegen pulled the Jervis Bay round to port under maximum rudder and headed straight for the Admiral Scheer.