by Alan Furst
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…”
The lead bomber came speeding through the lights, head on to the Burya, then flew over it. In the light, they could see a round ball, suspended from a parachute, as it floated down toward the destroyer. “Dorniers,” Ratter said. “Parachute mines.”
Behind the first, seven or eight more, flying abreast. As the explosions began at the front of the convoy, a silhouette flashed over the Tsiklon and a string of mines chained together plummeted to its deck. One breath, then a hot blast of air hit the bridge, as a second plane, wings tilted, roared over the Noordendam.
There were screams from the deck, tiny balls of yellow fire flashed through the bridge house, and a flight of chained mines spun through the air as the plane roared away. Then a hatch cover blew up, boards soaring into the sky, and a great peal of thunder rang deep inside the Noordendam, which made her heel over and shudder. It knocked DeHaan backward and, when he scrambled to his knees, Ratter was sitting next to him, looking puzzled. “Can’t hear,” he said. Then he reached for DeHaan’s forehead and pulled out a triangle of broken glass. “Don’t want this there, do you?”
DeHaan felt the blood running down his face. “I can do without it.”
Ratter’s face sparkled in the light and he began to brush at it with his fingertips. Scheldt used the binnacle to haul himself upright, then took hold of the wheel. “Ahh the hell,” he said. DeHaan stood up, wobbled, steadied himself, saw that Scheldt was staring at the compass. “Two eight two?” he said.
“Back to zero nine five, south of east,” DeHaan said.
Scheldt shook his head, pulled down on one spoke of the wheel, which spun free until he stopped it. “Gone,” he said.
DeHaan looked out through the shattered windows. The Tsiklon had vanished, and in the light of the burning trawler he could see smoke pouring from the forward hold, an orange shadow flickering at its center. “Johannes, are we making way?”
Ratter went out to the bridge wing and looked over the side. “Barely.” From the radio room: “Are you alive, up there?”
“Yes.”
“We are on fire.”
“We are.”
From their port beam, the blast of a foghorn, then another. It was an icebreaker, its searchlight playing over the deck of the Noordendam, then a voice shouted Russian over a loud-hailer. DeHaan went out on the bridge wing, where the AB was staring open-mouthed at the approaching bow of the icebreaker. Which now began to move right as the captain figured out that the Noordendam ’s steering was gone. Some of the passengers were signaling with their hands, go around us. With a final angry blast on the horn, the icebreaker’s bow passed the freighter’s stern with ten feet to spare.
DeHaan turned to go back to the bridge, then saw Kovacz, staggering up the ladderway. “Damage report,” he said. “The engine-room people are done for. That thing blew in the bulkhead, two of the boilers exploded, the third is still working. We have dead and wounded, one of the lifeboats is gone, and I can’t find Kees.”
“And we’ve lost our steering,” DeHaan said. Up toward number three hold, he saw that Van Dyck had the fire crews working, which meant that steam from the remaining bo
iler was giving them pressure on the hoses.
What was left of the convoy was moving east. Searchlights on, antiaircraft firing as the Dorniers returned for a second attack. DeHaan looked down at his feet, money, bills he didn’t recognize, was blowing all over the place. The mustached men with the machine guns. Who had built a small fortress of stacked trunks on the hatch cover of the forward hold.
Kovacz said, “I’m going back to the engine room, Eric. I’ll get some help and do whatever I can. Is the rudder broken free?”
“Gear frozen in the steering tunnel,” DeHaan said. “I’d bet that’s what it is.”
“Can’t be fixed.”
“No.”
“So, we’re going wherever we’re pointed.”
“Yes, a point or two west of north.”
“Finland.”
The battle moved east, slowly, ships and planes fighting hard, until there were only sudden flares of fire on the horizon, distant explosions, a few last searchlights in the sky, then darkness, and the Noordendam sailed alone. Opinion on the bridge had it that the small fleet was finished off, sunk, but they were not to know that. And there was a lot to be done. They were getting maybe two knots from the poor broken Noordendam but the one boiler, with Kovacz coaxing it along, kept them under way, helped by a following sea. Shtern worked hard, the passengers and crew helped-the dead were moved up to the afterdeck and decently covered, the wounded wrapped in blankets and sheltered from the wind. They searched everywhere for Kees, two missing ABs, and two passengers, but they’d apparently gone overboard during the Dornier attack and nobody had seen them after that.
Then it was quiet on the ship, and dark, because they were running with lights off. DeHaan ordered the scramble nets and gangway lowered and the lifeboats readied, then assigned crews to help the passengers-wounded first, then women and children. When that was done, the officers and crew began to gather their possessions.
0300 hours. At sea.
At DeHaan’s direction, Mr. Ali made contact with some Finnish authority-at the port of Helsinki or a naval base, they never really discovered who it was. DeHaan got on the radio and told them they had dead and wounded aboard, and were headed for the islands west of Helsinki, on the south coast. There would be no question of resistance, the passengers and crew of the Noordendam would surrender peacefully.
And under what flag did they sail?
Under Dutch flag, as an allied merchant vessel of Britain.
Well then, he was told, the word wasn’t precisely surrender. True, Finland was at war with Russia, despite their treaty, and true, that made her an ally of Germany. Technically. But, the fact was, Finland was not at war with Britain, and those who set foot on Finnish soil would have to be considered as survivors of maritime incident.
Was Finland, DeHaan wanted to know, at war with Holland?
This produced a longish silence, then the authority cleared its throat and confessed that it didn’t know, it would have to look that up, but it didn’t think so.
0520 hours. Off the coast of Finland.
In the watery light of the northern dawn, an island.
A dark shape that rose from the sea, low and flat, mostly forest, with quiet surf breaking white on the rocks. It was not unlike the other islands, some close, some distant, but this one lay dead ahead, a mile or so away, this was their island.
DeHaan moved the telegraph to Done — With — Engines, the bells acknowledged, and, a moment later, the slow, labored beat stopped, and left only silence. He picked up the speaker tube and said, “Come up to the bridge, Stas. We’re going to beach on the rocks, so clear the engine room.”
On the bridge, Scheldt was still on watch, standing before the dead helm. “Go and get your things together,” DeHaan told him. That left Ratter, and Maria Bromen, who stood close by his side. DeHaan took the Noordendam ’s log and made a final entry: date, time, and course. “Any idea what it’s called?” he asked Ratter.
“Maybe Orslandet,” Ratter said, looking at the chart. “But who knows.”
“We’ll call it that, then,” DeHaan said. He wrote it in, added the phrase Ran aground, signed the entry, closed the log, and put it in his valise. With the engine off, the Noordendam was barely making way. Out on deck, the passengers and crew had gathered in the dawn light, standing amid their baggage, waiting. The Noordendam, very close now, caught on a sandbar, but, with the incoming tide, slid off it and headed for the island.
Maria Bromen’s hand took his arm as they hit. The bow lifted, the hull scraped up over the rocks and then, with one long grinding note, iron on stone, the NV Noordendam canted over and came to rest, and all that remained was the sound of waves, lapping at the shore.
They searched for her, some time later, once the war in that part of the world had quieted down. She was, after all, worth something, there was always money to be made in rights of salvage, and all it would take was the filing of a claim. By that time it was full autumn, when the ice fog hung in the birch forests. There were two Swiss businessmen, a man of uncertain nationality who said he was a Russian migr, several others, nobody knew who they were. They asked the people who lived along that rockbound coast, fishermen mostly, if they’d seen her, and some said they had, while others just shook their heads or shrugged. But, in the end, they found nothing, and she was never seen again.
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