Look to the Wolves

by Look to the Wolves (retail) (epub)

  ‘That you, Cowan?’

  Everard: hunched on his seat, binoculars at his eyes… How he’d sensed one’s arrival in the bridge was a mystery: unless Cruickshank had muttered something. He might have: he’d peered around, a second earlier, and with the glow from the binnacle the bridge wasn’t entirely dark. But otherwise all eyes, watering or not, were strained into the surrounding darkness, primarily for other ships but also for floating mines. There was a westerly drift in this gulf, no doubt created by the influx of rivers at its eastern end, and it was thought that mines which had been spotted and destroyed in the Sea of Azov might well have been floated out from Bolshevik-held settlements on the northern shore.

  Bob had moved up behind Everard. ‘Not far to go now?’

  ‘Half an hour, thereabouts. You ready to go?’

  ‘Well –’ making a weak joke of it – ‘having come all this way…’

  A grunt. Then: ‘Pilot, let’s have some soundings.’

  There’d been plenty of water under her for the past eighty miles or so, steaming right down the middle with the land roughly ten miles on either hand, but as she crept northward now there’d be a gradual shelving to start with and then, almost for sure, shallower patches. You could virtually have fixed your position by soundings, if you could have relied on them being as shown on the chart; as things were now you couldn’t quite do that, but the general trend would be pretty well as shown. With luck Terrapin might get to within about three miles of the town and still have twelve feet under her when she stopped to send the boat away; she’d be due south of the point, then, and there’d be a rock – he’d forgotten its name – about halfway in, three thousand yards offshore. It had to be born in mind both as a navigational aid and as something to look out for – rather than bump into…

  The closer one could get in, the better, especially as they were going to land him in the whaler, under oars. There’d been a discussion about this earlier in the evening, and Mr Wilberforce, the commissioned engineer, had been adamant that the motorboat’s engine wasn’t to be trusted over any distance.

  Harriman had agreed. ‘Damn thing cokes up, drop of a hat. Wouldn’t make for a very happy situation, would it?’

  The motorboat’s engine was of the kind that had to be started on petrol, then changed over to run on paraffin as soon as the vaporizer was hot enough to do its job on the heavier fuel. It was the vaporizer that clogged up, ‘Monkey’ Wilberforce had explained, more than the sparking plug, the basic fault in his view lying with the variable quality of the paraffin. There were motorboats in the fleet now that had engines which ran entirely on petrol, but they were still hard to come by, the Admiralty objecting to (a) petrol engines’ higher cost, (b) the hazards involved in storing petrol in HM ships.

  Wilberforce had slapped the wardroom table with one large, creased hand; the other hand been wrapped around an enamel mug of near-black tea. He had enormous hands on unusually long arms, which presumably explained his nickname. ‘So it’s beef an’ brawn as’ll best put ye on the beach tonight, sir…’

  The leadsman’s voice rose hoarsely out of the darkness to starboard: ‘Deep four, sir!’

  A ‘deep’ was a point on the leadline at which there was no mark. At three there’d be three strips of leather, and at fifteen a piece of white bunting; on this sounding the leadsman would have seen the flash of white cloth about a fathom above the waterline. His alternative if marks weren’t visible in the dark – the blue bunting probably would not be, nor for instance would the ten-fathom mark, which was a piece of leather with a hole in it – was to go by whatever he found closest to his hand and allow for the distance between hand and waterline. But fourteen fathoms was dead right, matched the charted depth exactly. Everard had commented, ‘Right on the nose, Pilot, eh?’ And now to Bob, inconsequentially: ‘I hope for your sake there are some trains running.’

  * * *

  ‘Got it all in your head, Sub, have you?’

  Everard asked the question of Granger, Lounge-Lizard Larry, who was to be in charge of the boat. It was a few minutes past midnight: very soon the destroyer’s engines would be stopped and she’d drift to a halt in two fathoms of water, just under three miles from the port of Taganrog. Slightly better, therefore, than they’d hoped for. Everard’s intention was to drop an anchor then, but to get the whaler away first, cutting delays to a minimum.

  They were in the chartroom: he, Granger and Bob. Bob wearing uniform with a white rollneck sweater under his reefer jacket, folded-down leather seaboots with oiled-wool seaboot stockings in them, and his greatcoat over it all.

  Granger had nodded to that question, and was now repeating the bare bones of his orders. A course of north twenty west to be made good, but an estimated westward drift of about half a mile in the time the trip inshore was expected to take, course to steer thus north five west.

  The calculations were Cruickshank’s. Bob was less certain of what seemed to him to be an unsafe assumption, but he’d queried it earlier and been politely overruled, so now – being only a passenger here – he kept his mouth shut.

  Granger concluded, ‘And if I see the Cherry-packer thing I’ll know I’ve come too far east.’

  The rock’s name on the chart was Chyerypakha. Everard told him, ‘You’d be on your way to missing the landfall altogether.’

  ‘Yes. Hard a-port, then. But if the Pilot’s right about this westward set—,’

  ‘And if you steer a straight course and your compass isn’t deflected by that damn thing…’ Everard pointed at the .45 revolver holstered inside the sub-lieutenant’s oilskins, which were unbuttoned and hanging open. Granger had the boat compass with him too – a portable brass binnacle with a carrying handle on top and a lockable gymbal ring. It was locked now, of course, for transport, and the interior oil-lamp which would illuminate the compass card wasn’t lit yet.

  He’d nodded. ‘I’ll stow it well clear, sir.’

  ‘And your course back to the ship?’

  ‘Reverse of inshore course. Making good south twenty east, steering something like south thirty-five east. But depending on how I’ve found it on the way in, of course. And with your searchlight for a mark.’

  ‘We’ll expose the beam sixty minutes after you leave us.’

  ‘But – if we happened to make the inshore leg faster than expected, sir—’

  ‘All right. Forty-five minutes after you leave.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir. Thank you.’

  The searchlight, carbon-burning, was above and just abaft the bridge. By shining it vertically upwards into the clouds the whaler would have about as good a mark as one could hope for – might even have it in sight right from the point of departure from shore. Without something of the sort, a destroyer was a very small object to locate, in the dark and at the end of a three-mile pull on a dark night in a wind-lashed sea – literally in that sea, as they would be in a 27-foot open boat; and an outcome that Everard would dread was to have his boat lost and searching blindly for them, when he needed to get Terrapin out of the gulf before dawn.

  There was sleet in the wind now. A foretaste, no doubt, of conditions one could expect ashore. Back in the bridge – Granger having gone down to the boat – Everard said ‘Remains only to wish you luck, Cowan. I do, most sincerely, and I’ll look forward to good news of you. If you feel like it, drop me a line?’

  ‘Yes – I will. When I can… And I’m very grateful to you. Oh, and your great occasion tomorrow – every happiness, and—’

  The leadsman’s hail: ‘And a quarter, two!’

  Cruickshank’s bent frame swivelling: ‘Stop engines, sir?’

  * * *

  ‘I’ll say goodbye and good luck then, sir…’

  With one foot and both hands on the eight-inch mesh netting that slanted up from deck-level to the griping-spar, Bob glanced back at the first lieutenant’s oilskinned bulk – wet oilskins gleaming in light shed from the galley. The others – whaler’s crew and Granger – were already up there in the boat
, and he’d passed his canvas holdall up to one of them. He nodded to Harriman: ‘Thanks – for all your help.’ Climbing then, while the boat-lowering party of half a dozen men, three to each fall, stood ready, waiting for Harriman’s orders. Bob swung a booted leg over the spar, rested his weight on it while he got the other one over and then slid into the boat. The coxswain, a sharp-faced Irish leading seaman by the name of Hayes, put out a hand to steady him.

  ‘Thanks.’ Suppressing the urge to protest that he wasn’t that much of a bloody passenger: but clumsy enough in the heavy boots as he ducked under the fore-and-after and dumped himself in the sternsheets beside Granger. ‘My bag somewhere, Sub?’

  ‘Under the stern thwart, sir.’

  ‘Ah—’

  Harriman’s voice, from the iron deck: ‘Slip the gripes. Turns for lowering.’

  Gripes were bands of rope matting, like girths, which held a seaboat immovably against the horizontal griping-spar. Their shackles were being knocked off now, so they’d swing loose and free the boat for lowering. It was to be lowered almost right into the water, much as you’d do in harbour, not dropped from a height of several feet as was more usual with a seaboat and at sea.

  Harriman’s growl again: ‘Start the falls!’ The boat jerked, dropping an inch or two as the hemp ropes were allowed to creep around the staghorns. Then – having checked that there’d be no hangups – ‘Lower away!’, and the descent began, forward and after falls carefully in step so that the boat went down on an even keel, while its tendency to sway fore and aft was countered by the crew leaning their weight on crossed lifelines. Procedures that were entirely familiar, part and parcel of the home-from-home which one was on the point of leaving: as was Everard’s having turned his ship to provide a lee on this port side, shelter for the launching.

  ‘Vast lowering!’

  The order came from overhead, distant-sounding. The falls jerked to a stop. Hanging this low the ship’s rolling was a danger; some of the crewmen had unshipped their stretchers – the wooden bars that took the pressure of their feet when they were rowing – and were using them to fend off from the vertical steel side. And now Harriman’s voice again – ‘Out pins!’ His face was a pale blur up there as he leant over between the davits, watching to see the order carried out, bowman and stroke oarsman removing steel cotter-pins from the disengaging gear – the big hooks on which the boat was hanging – while the coxswain, Hayes, stood by the steel-wire fore-and-after which linked the hooks and was now keeping tension on them. Until now they’d been locked shut by those pins. Robinson’s Disengaging Gear, this assembly was called, and Bob had learnt all its mysteries in his cradle. Well, not cradle, exactly. Cradle days and early boyhood years had been spent in Russia – in St Petersburg – and instruction in elementary seamanship hadn’t begun until he’d been thirteen and a cadet in the Merchant Navy training ship, an ancient hulk moored in the Thames. But still – a long, long time ago… Hayes had called up to Harriman, ‘Pins out, sir…’

  ‘Slip!’

  Hayes’ job. When he let-go the fore-and-after, both hooks would release and the boat would drop into the sea. It would drop only a foot or two on this occasion, but even now the knack of it was to drop with a wave right under her, not up-ended or into a trough. A matter of fine judgement, when the ship was travelling at any speed, but as things were now – Terrapin lying stopped, and with the sea as low as it was – and anyway with no time for dithering—

  Now…

  The heavy timber boat fell, crashing in. Crewmen already getting their oars out, blades up on the gunwales, three on the starboard side and two to port: the imbalance would be corrected by a small amount of rudder. Hayes was in fact applying a lot of rudder right at this moment, so that the boat would sheer out from the ship’s side.

  ‘Give way, starboard…’

  Then when they were clear – lifting to a swell as they left the ship’s close shelter and the driving sleet made itself felt again – ‘Give way together!’

  Another wave burst in a sheet of something like ice-bullets as the crew put their weight on the oars and the boat began to forge ahead, lifting and rocking as the black ridges ran under, a mound ahead exploding to sheet back vivid white as her stem drove in. Oilskinned and sou’westered crewmen adjusting their positions on the thwarts, getting settled, into the rhythm of it but interrupted by Hayes again – ‘Easy, starboard!’ Voice pitched high, to be heard over all the surrounding noise – wind, sea, thumping of oars’ looms in the metal crutches. Starboard-side oars missed a stroke or two while he brought her round, at a safe distance from the destroyer’s plunging bow. Granger meanwhile crouching over his compass, which was glowing internally now, a pale radiance visible in the little window in its brass casing. He’d set it down on the boat’s centreline just abaft the stretcher against which the stroke oarsman’s feet were jammed. Hayes calling, ‘Together now. All together, lads…’ The boat lifting to a wave and for a few seconds lying almost on her side – wind gusting from behind the oarsmen’s left shoulders as she battered round into it, spray in it in sporadic bursts that thickened the continuous, horizontally-flying sleet. Tilting over that wave, angling down in a long surge forward then checking with the next one foaming white around her stem and boiling aft, the boat’s timbers juddering but five oars biting all together into solid water to drive her on. From Terrapin’s bridge the sea hadn’t looked like much – it wasn’t, from up there – but down here, at closer quarters – well, this was the reality. No joyride, exactly, but with no kind of agony in it either – no surprise either, you were only reminded of what you’d have expected anyway if you’d given it any forethought. And adjusting now to conditions as they were, Granger was moving the compass, re-positioning it between himself and the coxswain.

  ‘North five degrees west. There – as you go now… Uh?’

  ‘North five west – aye, sir!’

  The compass was the only guide. You couldn’t tell a helmsman how to steer when there was no mark of any sort to steer by, nothing ahead except darkness and the heave of black water. Granger unbuckling his webbing belt with the pistol in its holster, then passing it to Bob – to put distance between the metal and the compass needle, as advised earlier on by Everard. Thinking of whom – Bob was stowing the bundle under the thwart with his own gear and Granger’s binoculars which in these conditions were useless, when from the darkness astern came the metallic clatter of Terrapin letting-go an anchor.

  * * *

  Sitting upright in the whaler’s stern with his eyes narrowed against sleet and salt, Bob did his best to keep a lookout. Granger might well have been doing the same – some of the time, anyway – but he’d also be preoccupied with the course, ensuring that Hayes stayed close to it – the lubber’s line wavering more or less equally each side of it, no question of actually staying on the mark. And no other pair of eyes was free for looking-out.

  Thoughts wandering, meanwhile. At this moment, to Nadia.

  Connection being the boat, recollection of his last sight of her?

  As if one needed any explanation, for God’s sake… But it had been a motorboat, otherwise not unlike this one. Beamier, for sure, but a ship’s boat, no great difference, and it had been transferring her and the Solovyevs to a former Russian merchant ship, the Slava, which at that time had been flying the White Ensign. He’d relived the scene a hundred times, had it now clearly in his mind’s eye: heaving, greenish sea, Slava’s tall-funnelled profile in the background, and the boat bouncing its way across the gap with that huddle of passengers in its stern. Nadia’s taller figure distinctive with her mop of dark hair flying in the wind, Nick Solovyev between her and his fair-haired sister. Solovyev had had an arm round each of them, while in Nadia’s left palm – unless she’d slipped it inside her dress by that time, but she’d still had it hidden in her hand when she’d gone down the ladder – in that hand, the folded sheet of signal-pad on which he’d scrawled an address where she could get in touch with him if – no, when – s
he’d got herself to Britain.

  And neither of the Solovyevs having the slightest notion that anything of the sort had been going on.

  He thought self-mockingly, He who laughs last…

  Out there in the dark, a flare of white. Gone: then back again… Broken water – where there was no damn reason—

  Rock?

  Straining his eyes…

  Then he’d got it. Lost it again immediately, but had had it, beyond doubt, recognized—

  ‘Sub – boat of some kind – fine on the port bow, crossing left to right–’

  ‘Oars!’

  Rowing ceased instantly. Oars’ blades parallel to the water, men’s bodies hunched forward, all eyes on their coxswain, waiting.

  ‘God – yes…’

  Hayes called softly, ‘Port side only, one stroke!’

  To keep the boat’s head into the wind, which meant also pointing at whatever this craft was that was cutting a white track through black water, steering east across the whaler’s bow, roughly fifty yards ahead.

  May not see us – if we’re lucky…

  ‘Heads down, lads.’

  They were down. Hayes again: ‘Barty – one stroke, now…’

  ‘Two boats. See?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you’re right, sir… But – could be friendly, just as likely as—’

  ‘Best play it safe, Sub.’

  ‘Yes… Sir, my pistol—’

  He didn’t want to take his eyes off those craft, as he’d have had to do in the course of delving under the thwart for Granger’s revolver. Which please God there’d be no use for anyway. Even less than there’d be for the glasses; their front lenses would be plastered before you’d even got them to your eyes.

  He slid his hand into the greatcoat’s pocket all the same, touched his own pistol. Strictly for reassurance: no kind of expectation…

  ‘One stroke, Barty!’