by Alan Furst
It backed off, the morning of the seventeenth, with a violent red-streaked dawn, and DeHaan staggered down to his cabin, stripped off his clothes, and crawled into bed. He woke, some time later, to find something soft and warm in there with him, and spent a few seconds being exceptionally happy about that before he fell back asleep. Woke again, alone this time, he thought, until he came up from under the blanket and saw her standing at the porthole and gazing out. He watched her till she felt it and turned around, wiping her eyes. “You are looking at me,” she said.
“I am.”
“Well then,” she said. And came back to join him.
They were a day and a half late, steaming up past the Hebrides and swinging around the Orkney Islands into the North Sea, but there was still time to reach the Smygehuk by the twenty-first, as long as the weather held fair. Which it did, but for a series of line squalls in the wake of the storm that neither DeHaan nor the Noordendam took very seriously. These had been busy sea-lanes before the war, but no longer—only a few fishing boats, a British destroyer in the distance, a corvette that came up on their starboard beam and stayed with them for twenty minutes, then found something better to do. They were alone after that, in choppy gray waters, cold and grim, running south-southeast between Britain and Norway, with the Skagerrak, portal to the German Empire, lying some twelve hours to the east.
At dusk, DeHaan took a commander’s tour around the ship—a campfire-to-campfire, night-before-the-battle tour. Slow and easy, with all the time in the world, he stopped to smoke a North State with some off-watch ABs, had a salt-beef sandwich and cold tea in the crew’s mess, sat on a bench in the workshop that adjoined the engine room and chatted with the oilers and firemen. He grew prouder of his crew as the evening wore on—there was none of the usual griping and bitching, no tales of thievery or fistfights. Nothing quite like danger, he thought, to cure the bullshit of daily life.
He took Amado aside and told him he might be on stage once more, in the coming days. He asked Van Dyck if he could rig a communication line from the bridge to the radio room, and Van Dyck said he could, using spares kept on hand for the bridge/engine-room system. “It’ll look like hell,” the bosun said. “Tube running down the helm and across the deck.”
“Do it anyhow,” DeHaan told him.
He visited with Shtern, in a former storage locker, heavily whitewashed and made over into an infirmary, a red cross painted on the door, and finally with S. Kolb, found reading in the wardroom.
“Good book, Herr Kolb?”
Kolb held the spine up for DeHaan to see. H. Kretschmayr, Geschichte von Venedig. “A history of Venice,” he said. “I found it at my hotel in Lisbon.”
“Wars and trading fleets?”
“Doges.”
In those hats.
“It goes only to 1895,” Kolb said. “But maybe that’s not so bad.”
“We will be entering German waters, tonight,” DeHaan said. “I thought I’d let you know.”
“Am I to be assigned—an action station?”
DeHaan was diplomatic. “We don’t expect to be doing very much fighting, Herr Kolb, but, if something happens, we know where to find you.”
“I can work a radio, sir.”
I bet you can. “Oh? Well, we’ll keep that in mind.”
Ratter shot starsights at 2100 hours, and calculated they would cross a line parallel to Stavanger, Norway—six degrees east longitude—not long after midnight. “Their front door,” he said.
“Yes, if we’re going to be stopped, it will happen there.”
“Ship dark? In midstream?”
“No, all lit up, and six off the Norwegian coast.”
At 0018 hours, on 20 June, 1941, the NV Noordendam entered German-occupied Europe, curving around a welcoming minefield that served, on this sea border, as barbed wire. DeHaan noted it in the log with particular care, because he sensed they would not be coming out. A dark shore, to the north. Blacked out. No lighthouses, no lightships, no bells or horns or signal buoys—none of the navigational apparatus that had helped mariners find their way for centuries. Still, with nothing more than a sickle moon, it should have been like any night sea voyage—ship’s bells on the half hour, engine full ahead, wake churning behind them—but it wasn’t, because whatever was watching and waiting out there could be felt. Calm down, DeHaan told himself, but it didn’t help, and Ruysdal, beside him at the helm, wasn’t doing much better. “Bearing zero nine five, Cap’n,” he said, for absolutely no reason.
“Steady as she goes,” DeHaan answered. Like dogs, he thought, barking at the night.
Then all hell broke loose.
From the coast, huge searchlight beams went stabbing into the sky and DeHaan grabbed his binoculars, followed the beams, saw nothing. But a distant hum to the west deepened, as he searched, to a low rumble, then swelled to the full roar of a bomber formation. In answer, antiaircraft cannon: dozens of them drumming together, with pinprick flashes from the shore and flak burst high above—slow, silent puffs turned ash-gray by the searchlights. The first bombs were like sharp thunder, single explosions that broke over the rhythm of the cannon and rolled across the water, then more, and louder, all run together as the main body of the formation came over target. With, clearly, at least some incendiaries, which, whatever they hit, produced great pillars of orange fire as smoke poured up into the sky.
A shadow sliced through the lower edge of a beam and Ruysdal said, “Dive-bomber.” Its engine screamed as it fled away, lights chasing it until it banked hard and came howling out over the sea, toward the Noordendam, where a crowd of sailors on deck cheered wildly and waved as though the pilot could see them. “Brave sonofabitch.” This from Ratter, standing over the green binnacle light, which lit up his face from below as though he were a kid with a flashlight.
DeHaan turned back toward the shore in time to see a second dive-bomber—or the first, back for more—a black flash against the firelight, followed by a beautiful white starburst, with smoke trails that arched high in the air, and one blurred snapshot of what might have been a superstructure. “Ship?” he said.
“Looks like it, sir,” Ruysdal said.
“They’re after the naval base at Kristiansand,” Ratter said.
It continued. Stuttering antiaircraft, the night lit by fire. “I think there’s a possibility,” Ratter said, “that this is for us.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” DeHaan said.
“Are you sure?”
After a moment he said, “No.”
One of the searchlight beams had found a bomber, a thin line of smoke streaming from the fuselage beneath its wing. A second searchlight joined in, then a third. They were very good at it now—they’d pin this bastard against the clouds as long as they liked. Not so long. The plane rolled over, very slowly, then tumbled like a falling leaf, this way and that, until it plunged into the sea and left no more than steam.
BALTIC HARBORS
They left the Skagerrak minefields on a perfect summer morning.
Coming around the Skaw at 0730, with Ratter and DeHaan working together on the bridge, where they’d been all night, draining mug after mug of coffee and poring over the British maps until they were sure they had it right and only then ordering the course changes. They had also, since midnight, stationed two ABs at the bow, watching the water ahead of the ship, because it never got all that dark up here this time of year—almost Midsummer’s Eve, the Scandinavian sky pale and silvery long before the sun rose. Otherwise, it seemed to DeHaan like normal commercial life in the Kattegat—two Norwegian coasters up ahead of them, a coal-burning freighter in the distance, and, the only sign of occupation, a converted trawler, flying the naval swastika, patrolling the Danish shoreline.
For the first time in fourteen hours, DeHaan relaxed, and began to think about his aching feet and the bunk in his cabin. He’d just slipped the maps back in their envelope when one of the lookouts came charging up the ladder and shouted, “Loose mine, Cap’n, off the port bow.
”
“Come to full stop,” he told Ratter, then trotted after the AB, who could really run. They got up to the bow in a hurry but, he realized, he might just as well have taken his time, because the minute he saw it he knew there wasn’t a thing in the world he could do about it.
It bobbed thirty feet off the bow, a rusty iron ball, long ago painted orange, with detonator horns sticking out all over and a broken chain trailing down into the water. Not especially warlike or sinister, from the look of it, simply practical; six hundred pounds of amatol, enough to blow up a village.
Transfixed, DeHaan and the ABs stood still for a moment and watched as the thing slid past them. The engine was stopped but that didn’t matter, momentum would carry them along for quite a while, as it would despite a hard-rudder change of course. They might have used the rifle on it, DeHaan thought, but it was much too close. No, all he could do was walk back along the deck, keeping it company, waiting to see if fate would send a small wave or a little cat’s paw of wind, finally standing at the stern, by happenstance still alive, and watching as it floated away on the sun-dappled water.
The master of the Noordendam and one of his passengers were absent from dinner on the night of the twentieth. Some time early the next morning they would be off the southern coast of Sweden, no doubt a busy time for all, so he’d perhaps chosen that evening to rest, sending the mess boy to the kitchen for onion and margarine sandwiches and relieving his personal, chartroom store of two bottles of lambic beer. Rich stuff, thick and deep, brewed by merry friars—one would suppose—in the cellars of the Saint Gerlac abbey in Belgium, the saint’s emblem, a hermit in a tree, handsomely rendered on the label. Saint Gerlac came in very large bottles, with ceramic stoppers to reseal the beer if its drinking were perchance interrupted—by a rain of gold coins or an unexpected birth—and had to be finished later.
By seven-thirty they’d entered the Oresund, channel to the Baltic and the narrowest part of the Danish pinchpoint, with an occupied, blacked-out port of Helsingr on the Danish side, and pretty lights in the Swedish Hlsingborg, three miles across the sound. The Noordendam stayed well to the neutral side of the water, so passed close to Hlsingborg.
A long, slow dusk, that time of day. DeHaan’s cabin was dark, beer bottles and sandwich plates on the floor, clothes piled neatly on a chair. “Can we go and see it?” she asked, climbing out of bed. DeHaan unlatched the brass fitting on the porthole and opened it wide—a warmish evening, the air felt good on his skin. They were close in to Hlsingborg, close enough to see the wooden buildings in the harbor, all painted the same shade of red, close enough to see a long row of sailboats, and a man who’d walked his dog out to the end of the sailboat dock and waved to the freighter as it went by.
“Would be nice,” she said. To be here together.
“It would, some day.”
“Some day.” Which will likely never come, she meant. “Does something happen tonight?”
“We get where we’re going, about two in the morning, we unload a cargo, and then with a little luck we’re bound for, well, not home, but somewhere like it.”
“Ah,” she said. “I thought so.”
“You knew?”
“It’s in the air, like before a storm.”
At the municipal pier, two boys stood waist-deep in the oily water and splashed each other.
“You know how to swim?” he said, only half joking.
“You would let me?”
It took him a slow moment to understand that this was a woman’s question, not a fugitive’s question, and he put his arms around her and pulled her back against him. It felt so good he didn’t speak right away, finally said, “Never,” then added, “Also the water’s too cold.”
“This country is too cold.” The municipal dock fell away behind them, replaced by a cluster of tiny houses where the town turned back into an old village. “But what if it should happen that we could go, somewhere?”
“Then we’d go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere in the countryside.”
“Which countryside?”
“France, maybe. At the end of a little road.”
“Oh? Not by the sea?”
He smiled. “With a view of the sea.”
“Like in a book,” she said. “You would be on a terrace, with a spyglass.” Using circled thumbs and forefingers she made a pretend spyglass, pointed it at the porthole and squinted one eye. “‘Oh the sea, how I miss it.’ You would too, my sweet friend.”
Now the edge of Hlsingborg was gone, and they steamed past flat, rocky coast in gray light. “It’s like this until we get to Copenhagen,” he said.
“I was there. I like those people, the Danes, and they have good food. Very good food. Or, anyhow, they used to.”
“It’s not so bad for them, not so bad as other places.”
“Will be bad. You’ll see.”
They were quiet for a time, not happy that they’d strayed back to real life. “You feel good back there,” she said. “So interested.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.” Gently, she unwrapped his arms and went to the bookshelf where he kept the wind-up Victrola. She took the album of records off the shelf, then chose one. “Is this good?”
It was the Haydn cello quartet. “I like it.”
“Can we play it while—we go back to bed?”
“For ten minutes, then it ends.”
“Let it end.”
“It will go chk-taca, chk-taca.”
She made a face, a scowl, annoyed that she couldn’t have what she wanted. “Stupid thing,” she said.
They passed a darkened Copenhagen, then the lights of Malm. A Swedish patrol boat shadowed them for a time, a little too close for comfort, then backed off without bothering to challenge. Likely they assumed the Santa Rosa was hauling war materials, down to Kiel or Rostock, and were disinclined to irritate their German neighbors, staring at them across the strait. DeHaan was back on the bridge by then, just after midnight, where he thought about her and thought about her, mostly why now thoughts, about how the world gave with one hand and took away with the other.
They rounded the Swedish coast soon after that, coming into the Baltic, and, a kind of miracle, on time. No, he thought, not a miracle. Hard work. Particularly Kovacz, down in the engine room, holding Noordendam to her best eleven knots. Fighting his war against a rickety pipe system, mending it at the elbows where the steam liked to break free and see if it could scald somebody, putting his heart’s blood into the rise and fall of the great brass piston rods. There should be a medal for them, Kovacz and his firemen and oilers, or a mention in dispatches. But there would be nothing like that, of course, because for this kind of work there were no dispatches. Perhaps a muted smile from Hallowes but they’d never see it. There would be one final, arid message from the NID, DeHaan thought, a destination, then silence.
Ratter was out on the bridge wing, shooting his stars, his Gothic Sextant With Artificial Horizon aimed up at the heavens, because they had to hit 5520′N and the longitude right on the nose. Ratter, too, deserved a medal. Andromedae, Ceti, Eridani, Arietis, Tauri, Ursae Majoris, Leonis, Crucis, and Virginis—just like Odysseus, patron saint of any captain so mother-dumb he could get lost in the Aegean. Ratter took another reading, then peered at his almanac: “Corrections for the Moon’s Upper and Lower Limbs.” At least the stars were visible, with only a few drifting shreds of moonlit cloud. Black night and driving rain would have been welcome, except that they never would have found their position. So they had to be visible, and they were, in this thin summer darkness, and too bad for them.
“Johannes?”
“Yes.”
“Getting what you need?”
“Pretty much, I am.”
“How are we doing?”
“Good. We’re just off Cuba.”
21 June, 0250 hours. Off the Smygehuk.
The Noordendam ran dark now. And silent—bell system turned off, crew ordered to be quiet,
engine rumbling at dead-slow speed on a flat sea. A mile off the port beam, one fishing village, a few dim lights in the haze, then nothing, only night on a deserted coast.
On the bridge, DeHaan and Ratter, the AB Scheldt out on the wing, a green signal lamp held at his side, while Van Dyck waited with a crew at the anchor winch. DeHaan looked at his watch, he had a few minutes to wait, so called down to the radio room, using the newly installed voice tube. “Mr. Ali, everything as usual?”
Ali’s voice was excited. “It is not, sir, it is not. The whole world is transmitting! Up and down the bandwidth—one stops, another starts.”
Ratter could hear the tone but not the words. “What’s going on?”
“Heavy wireless traffic,” DeHaan said. Then, to Ali, “Anything in clear?”
“A few words in German, maybe harbor boats. But the cipher, dear me! And fast, sir, a lot that must be sent.”
“Any idea where it’s coming from?”
“How would I know? But they’re strong signals, so it could be Germany.”
