Convoy North (A John Mason Kemp Thriller)

by Philip McCutchan

  ‘Not me — Torrence, Captain’s steward. Flapping ears. He says it’s to do with the Russians. Well, of course, I know we’re bound for Russia, so I reckon there may not be anything special in it, but then again, you never bloody well know, do you?’

  ‘Not often, no. Brassbound buggers don’t give much away to the lower deck, not usually.’ Napper sucked at his teeth, glad to have someone of about his own status to moan to: and it wasn’t often he got called mister, and he was flattered and grateful. ‘Want to know what I reckon? It’s that there Nazi, my prisoner.’ Napper liked the sound of ‘my prisoner’ and said it again. ‘If ‘e wasn’t my responsibility, I reckon I’d do ‘im in and settle it. Another thing — I reckon Stalin comes into it somewhere.’

  ‘Stalin, eh? How?’

  Napper shrugged. ‘I dunno. Just does. I don’t like it, not at all I don’t. I reckon we’ll never be allowed to leave bloody Archangel ever again.’

  ‘Go on!’

  Napper wagged a finger. ‘You just see. That Stalin and ‘is secret police, OGPU, isn’t it? I dunno the ins and outs like. But we’re carrying a load o’ dynamite and I don’t mean the flipping cargo either. That there von whatsit, Hagen...and Stalin, ‘e won’t be letting us off the hook once we’re in ‘is grasp. You mark my words, Mr Buckle. We’re political now. Bloody political. You know what that means.’

  Buckle didn’t, but he nodded sagely. ‘Dirty,’ he said. ‘Dirty bastards the lot of them, politicians.’

  ‘Out for their own ends like, all the time... ’

  It wasn’t only Torrence who had flapping ears. So the word spread. The Hardraw Falls was to be seized by the Russians the moment she entered Archangel. But in the meantime there were other and more immediate worries. Napper was still talking to the chief steward when the ship gave a lurch and her roll increased sharply. There seemed to be a shift of wind at the same time, a curious silence on one side and a battering of waves on the other, and a sudden heightening of the creaks and groans that had started soon after the bow had been blown apart.

  ‘Christ above,’ Napper said in an alarmed tone, ‘they’re turning the bloody ship around! And I don’t reckon it’s back the way we came either!’

  III

  Kemp was well aware of the enormous risk: but there was an emergency and in his view the risk was justifiable in the new circumstances. Amory had reported the collision bulkhead holding up; it should be capable of taking the strain so long as it didn’t go on for too long and so long as no attempt was made to go beyond half speed. Theakston had been aghast at Kemp’s suggestion, but Kemp had been firm, as obstinate as Theakston himself, and in the end had quoted the Trade Division’s authority. Theakston had said he wanted it entered in the ship’s official log that he, as master, had objected strenuously but had been overruled by the Commodore. He wanted it entered also that in his view the ship would be in immediate danger of foundering with all hands.

  ‘I shall take full responsibility,’ Kemp said.

  ‘Aye, and that’s to go in the log as well.’

  ‘It will. It’s very proper of you to insist, Captain —’

  ‘Thank you for nowt!’ Theakston snapped. ‘I know my job as master.’

  Kemp hadn’t liked it; he understood Theakston’s point of view very well, and would have had a similar reaction himself if his command had been interfered with. But that signal had had every possible ring of urgency; and reading between the lines Kemp believed that the delivery of von Hagen had become more important than the Hardraw Falls herself or her cargo, however vital that might be, and was, to the Russian war effort and the repulse of Hitler’s hordes. On the other hand, to lose the ship would be to lose von Hagen as well, a prospect that would scarcely command itself to the Admiralty or the Russians. So it was to be a calculated risk, everything depending now on the collision bulkhead and its ability to withstand the pressures of wind, snow and the Barents Sea.

  When the ship made the turn, with Theakston clicking his tongue at every shudder, Kemp went below to talk to von Hagen. As on the previous occasions, he spoke to the German alone, with the armed sentry standing by outside and backed up by Petty Officer Napper. Von Hagen, Kemp thought, looked a sick man: the immersion was still having its effect, and the Nazi’s face was drawn and full of stress. He lay on his side on the bunk, fingers plucking.

  Kemp asked, ‘How are you feeling now, von Hagen?’

  ‘Not good. But not all that bad.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that. It was a damn stupid thing to do — going overboard.’

  Von Hagen laughed, a sad and bitter sound. ‘And that, if I may say so, Captain Kemp, is a damn stupid thing to say! Isn’t the Barents Sea better than Siberia — or any other kind of lingering death the Russians might inflict on me?’

  Kemp shrugged. ‘You have a point, I don’t deny. But —’

  ‘But you are going to do your best for me. You said that. I may not be handed over — you said.’ The eyes gleamed in sardonic humour. ‘Do you still say that?’

  ‘I gave no promises of success. Only of trying...and that I shall do. I gave you my word on that.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  ‘But I still ask your help. I want to know many things, von Hagen.’ Kemp had sat in the chair close to the bunk; now he leaned forward and spoke insistently. ‘I want any information — you know this already — that you have in your head. Tell me that, and you will have a better chance. Oh, I know you believe a British Intelligence officer will board us, but you can’t be sure of that, not wholly sure. And there’s another and more specific thing I want to know.’

  ‘And that is?’

  Kemp said, ‘What your personal importance is. I believe there’s something beyond your acquired knowledge that makes it so vital that you be handed over to the Russians. Why should Britain agree to part with you? What’s behind all this, von Hagen?’

  ‘Call it the dirt of inter-governmental intrigue.’

  ‘Yes. I know all that. But what’s the reason?’

  ‘It wouldn’t help you, old friend! You would still have your duty to do...and if possible your promise to keep, your promise to try to help.’

  ‘It’s not a question of possibility or otherwise. That promise stands. But I’d like to be forearmed with the full story, the whys and wherefores. And I don’t see that you would lose anything by telling me.’

  Von Hagen shook his head and blew out his breath in some-thing like despair. ‘What makes you think I know?’

  ‘Because you are an agent, and a top one as I understand it.’

  ‘It makes no difference. In Germany, in the Third Reich, there are many secrets and they are strictly kept. There are so many right hands that don’t know what the left ones are up to. In any case it is not my people, not the Government, who are handing me over, is it?’

  ‘No. But I thought that with your special knowledge —’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand.’

  ‘And I believe you do know, von Hagen.’

  ‘Then you must continue to believe that. I cannot enlighten you. For the sake of an old friendship, I ask you not to press any further.’ There was the glimmer of a smile. ‘Like your former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin on a certain occasion, my lips are sealed!’

  IV

  ‘I’m driven to the conclusion,’ Kemp said to Cutler later, ‘that the reason’s personally discreditable to von Hagen and he doesn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Such as, maybe, he’s operated inside Russia?’

  ‘Possibly committed atrocities there.’

  ‘Pure revenge on the part of the Russians, sir?’

  Kemp nodded. ‘One can’t blame them. But I’m not sure I like being used as an agent of revenge. Especially as I’ve known the man so well.’

  ‘Some years ago now, sir.’

  Kemp raised his eyebrows. ‘What the hell difference does that make?’

  ‘Sorry, sir. But in fact there is a difference. Just the fact we’ve gone to war since then.
’

  ‘Don’t try to teach me about loyalty, Cutler.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Cutler gave a cough and went off at a tangent. ‘There’s something you may have noticed. I certainly have.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The crew, sir. Funny atmosphere. It’s spread to the naval party too.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed, no. Can you expand, Cutler?’

  Cutler screwed up his face. ‘Hard to pinpoint it, but there’s a wary look and everyone’s on edge over something —’

  ‘Over von Hagen for my money! That’s natural, if the galley wireless has painted word pictures about the man.’

  ‘Sure, but I think it goes deeper. It’s not the danger to the ship either. Or I don’t think so. It’s...oh, I guess I really don’t know, sir...something about the voyage itself maybe...’

  ‘That’s not very explicit, is it?’ Kemp looked hard at the young sub-lieutenant’s face: clearly Cutler was anxious and was disinclined to let the matter go by default. Kemp believed there was nothing in it; Cutler hadn’t the sea experience to understand the gloom that so often affected a ship and her crew. On the liner run to Australia a miasma of ridiculous depression usually settled over the crew once they had left Fremantle homeward bound for the London River and Tilbury. It was a feeling that they simply couldn’t wait to see the white cliffs of Dover again and another long voyage done. They called it an attack of the Channels. It was pretty well universal.

  Cutler said, ‘With your permission, sir, I’ll have a word with Petty Officer Napper.’

  ‘I wouldn’t if I were you. All you’ll get is a classified list of symptoms. But if you really want to, don’t mind me!’

  V

  ‘I dunno, sir.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Napper. Petty Officer Napper. I thought Navy senior rates kept a finger on the pulse.’

  ‘Well, yes, sir, they does, that’s true.’ Petty Officer Napper, who believed that it could have been his conversation with Buckle that had started the buzz about dangers waiting in Archangel on its rounds, was trying to be non-committal. ‘I remember once, sir, when I was in the old Emperor of India, the commander —’

  ‘Okay. Project your mind into the here and now, all right?’

  Daft little bugger, Napper thought angrily, still wet behind the ears was Cutler. In an aggrieved tone he said, ‘The hands is worried, that I’ve noticed, yes. They don’t like going into Russian waters, sir. No more do I.’

  ‘For God’s sake...they aren’t cannibals!’

  ‘Not far off, sir. Not far off.’

  ‘Oh, boloney —’

  ‘Tisn’t, sir! I’ve ‘eard yarns, seen it in the papers, spitting babies on bayonets and frying the poor little sods like eggs —’

  ‘That was the Nazis.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Or said to be. And I don’t know about the frying, that’s a new one. Back to the point, Petty Officer Napper: what’s the mood?’

  ‘They’re pissed off, sir.’

  ‘That all? They’ll get over it.’

  Napper was just about to say, but had decided not to in case he got any backlash, that the mood was nasty and deteriorating, when there was a sudden booming sound from for’ard and the Hardraw Falls checked her way through the water as the engines shuddered to full astern.

  FIFTEEN

  I

  Theakston reacted fast: the moment he heard that hollow booming sound he had personally wrenched the telegraph over to emergency full astern. In the engine-room Chief Engineer Sparrow, cursing the way his engines were being mistreated, responded as fast. Quickly the strain came off the shored-up collision bulkhead for’ard. Theakston shouted across the wheelhouse at Kemp.

  ‘Just what I feared likely!’ He had spoken to Kemp’s retreating back: the Commodore was on his way down the ladder, making for the site of the damage. On the way he was joined by Cutler and Napper, the latter white around the gills and moving with obvious reluctance to put himself behind the bulkhead where the danger lay.

  Kemp reached the fo’c’sle door and went down the ladder into the compartment abaft the collision bulkhead. There was total confusion: he found Amory and the hands standing in around three feet of water, with more welling up from the starboard lower corner of the bulkhead, where one of the shoring beams lay snapped in two and half submerged, broken right away from the metal that it should have been sustaining. There was blood on the water, and Kemp saw two men supporting another of the hands, holding the head above the level of the water. The man was dead: the head was stove in and brain matter was oozing through the hair.

  Sickened, Kemp looked away. ‘What happened?’ He asked Amory. ‘A gradual weakening, or —’

  ‘I reckon it was more than that,’ Amory said. ‘I can’t say for sure, but there could have been floating ice, broken pack ice. We’re likely to get plenty of that from now on.’

  Kemp nodded; from the bridge no floating ice had yet been seen, but with the snow still driving down so thickly it could have been obscured from sight as it drifted past. And a big wave could perhaps have smashed a sizeable block of it against the already weakened bulkhead. A quick visual examination had already shown up a number of sheared rivets. Kemp asked, ‘Any hope of controlling it, Amory? How about the pumps?’ He could hear the pumps in motion but was not surprised when Amory said they were being overtaken by the water pouring through. Even since Kemp had arrived on the scene, the level had deepened by a matter of three inches or so. He saw nothing that could be done for the moment: already, under Theakston’s orders, the Hardraw Falls was swinging round across the sea, back once again to a sternwise progress. Once she was round and steadied, Amory said, he would wait till the pumps had overcome the reduced inflow and then he would try to encase the lifted section of the bulkhead in the seaman’s last hope, a cement box — the construction of a wooden framework around the damage and pouring in of enough general dunnage mixed with sand and cement to seal it off.

  Kemp waited until the ship was turned and all the weight was once again off the bulkhead. As the water level came down, he returned to the bridge and put Theakston in the picture.

  ‘One man lost, I’m sorry to say, Captain.’

  Theakston said nothing but his look was formidable. Kemp moved away from him: he didn’t want a barney over the man’s death, for which he felt responsible. Had he not gone against Theakston’s advice...but that was in the past and he had only responded to what he had seen as his duty to reach Archangel as fast as possible. In war, men died. That was axiomatic. But it didn’t lift the lead weight from the Commodore’s mind.

  II

  The death made its presence felt throughout the ship. The man who had died was not in fact a particularly popular member of the crew; he had become known as something of a scrimshanker. But his death, the crunch of that shoring beam, had changed all that and he had become a symbol, a focal point of the mounting unease that had permeated the fo’c’sle hands. To die in action was one thing, to die because a stuffed-shirt commodore thought he knew better than the Old Man was quite another. It had been an unnecessary death and there might well be more, since there was still a party standing by the collision bulkhead and, according to the acting bosun, would remain there even after the cement box had been set up. Anything might happen at any moment, and most of the seamen would at one time or another find themselves taking a turn at bulkhead watch.

  ‘And balls to that for a lark,’ one of them said - the closed-face Londoner with a nasty twist to his mouth, Able Seaman Swile.

  ‘Nothing we can do about it, mate...’

  ‘I dunno so much. We can make representations, can’t we?’

  ‘Fat lot of good!’

  ‘Worth a go. Not to Amory or the Old Man. The bloody Navy, what was responsible in the first place.’ Swile didn’t say any more just then, he kept his own counsel until a propitious moment. He had his sights set on Petty Officer Napper, who had spent the voyage looking as disgruntled as a caught herring, the more so since his sa
d encounter with the metal rim of the wash-port. Napper had just the sort of fed-up look that said he might be a willing co-operator.

  Swile’s moment came when Napper was seen coming down a ladder and making for the naval ratings’ messroom. Swile buttonholed him outside the door.

  ‘Can I have a word, mister?’

  Mister again; Napper nodded and managed a smile. ‘Yer. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Matter of me mate. The one what got it at the collision bulk-head.’

  ‘Oh, ah? Mate of yours, was he, eh? Sorry about that, son.’

  ‘So are we all. We don’t want no more.’ There was truculence in Swile’s tone and Napper stiffened slightly, scenting trouble in a biggish way. ‘That Commodore, he don’t know what he’s doing, went against the Old Man’s advice...so we heard.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ Napper asked cautiously, moving closer to the door of the messroom.

  ‘Me and me mates.’

  ‘You representing them, like?’

  ‘Yes. Round Robin.’

  ‘Round Robin, eh? Round Robin my arse! In the Andrew we call it mutiny —’

  ‘We’re not bloody Navy, mister.’

  ‘Maybe not. I am. And you’re under the Commodore’s discipline and he’s a rocky — RNR. A decent bloke too.’ Napper might be chokker with this trip, but he resented criticism of Kemp and the Navy. ‘Know something, do you? If two or more persons sign a request form — that’s to say, if the request isn’t made by one man as an individual — then we calls it mutiny. A mutinous gathering, see? Even though only on paper.’

  Swile sneered. ‘Load of crap is that.’

  ‘Laid down in King’s Regulations, crap or not.’

  Swile lifted a bunched fist and waved it at Napper’s nose. ‘You just pass on what I said. It’s not just you bloody Navy lot. It’s that Nazi. All this is because he’s aboard. You can’t deny that. No one can. We don’t want our lives put at risk for a fucking Nazi.’