Bloody Sunset

by Bloody Sunset (retail) (epub)

  Another way of phrasing that would have been to say he’d bluff his way through just about anything. Which was a reminder of the distrust he – Bob – had begun to feel at that first meeting, at the Dunsterforce HQ. He’d thought about it quite a bit – that gleam of what had looked like triumph, then the way he’d so quickly smothered it…

  But what the hell. Russians not being by nature undemonstrative, and Nikolai Solovyev being no stolid peasant, he’d been on the point of more or less whooping with delight, then seen the cold British eyes on him – and imposed self-control, the stiff upper lip. Something like that. In any case it wasn’t easy to imagine what trickery could be involved: it was his own neck he was putting on the block, no one else’s. He was a fairly intrepid character, in fact. And everyone seemed to like him.

  He’d turned his back on the rail now: looking at Bob, and running the palm of one hand round his stubbled jawline. ‘Well now, Robert Aleksand’ich – might be a good time for a glass of tea, d’you think?’

  * * *

  The mess-traps in Zoroaster’s wardroom were of Russian provenance. Very few items matched, few cups were unchipped or plates uncracked. But the tea glasses – tumblers, actually – were of fine thin glass, really quite elegant in their filigree coasters.

  Solovyev put a lump of sugar in a spoon, dipped it in his tea, then sucked the tea through it rather noisily. If he’d done the same in a railway café in, say, Clapham – or Glasgow – Bob reflected, he’d have drawn critical stares if not comments. He smiled to himself as he put a sugar-lump in his own spoon. The appropriate naval expression would have been Different ships, different long-splices: the equivalent roughly of When in Rome… The Count asked him, ‘Would you tell me how your father came to make his life in Russia?’

  The black, heavily sweetened tea was delicious. He nodded. ‘Quite a story, really. Starts with my grandfather. He was a trawler skipper, on the west coast of Scotland. Lost his ship – literally had her sink under him, in one of those storms – well, you wouldn’t know, but they do get them, on that coast… Anyway – needing to earn a living, he’d taken some dockside job. In Argyllshire, this was – about 1860. Then he had a second stroke of bad luck – fell into a ship’s hold and broke his back. So having lost his livelihood he’d then lost his capacity to work at all – at least for a while. And he had a wife and son – my father was ten years old at this time. So they moved down to Glasgow where a married sister had a room to spare, they could live in it for a while and my grandmother – father too – could get occasional work. Better than the workhouse for all three of them, anyway. And from Glasgow, my father ran away to sea.’

  ‘He deserted his parents?’

  ‘He stowed away. I suppose you could say he deserted them, but in the long run he couldn’t have done anything better for them – as it turned out… Anyway – his father had been a trawlerman, so he’d thought he’d try that too. Couldn’t get a berth – or any other seagoing job, cabin-boy, anything – but he’d been hanging around the docks a lot, and eventually he stowed away, hid in a freighter’s hold, and stayed hidden until they were off Kronstadt – they were taking the hatchcovers off, to be ready for when the lighters came alongside, and there he was. But the ship’s master didn’t want whatever complications were involved in those days with stowaways and the local regulations – fines, possibly, I don’t know – and the simple answer was to throw him overboard.’

  Visualizing the scene, seeing between the lines of his father’s own terse description of it. The raggedly-dressed, half-starved urchin – big as a middling-sized dog – and snarling like one, like as not… The seamen towering around him, gaunt giants in silhouette against grey moving sky. A growl from one – Best get it done with, lads – and the ring closing, long arms and calloused hands spread to catch him…

  ‘The ship was only about half a mile offshore, and he’d learnt to swim, after a fashion, so he got ashore all right. He was strongly made, incidentally. Short but stocky – weightlifter’s build, you might say. Although just at that time he’d have been as scrawny as a rat… Anyway, he had the luck – and nerve – to get himself a job in a merchant’s warehouse, and pretty soon he was making himself so useful they couldn’t do without him. He was good with figures, and he very quickly picked up enough Russian to get by, and before long he was this man’s bookkeeper, also interpreting for him with English-speaking ships’ captains and supercargoes – oh, and correspondence with British shippers and importers – and you could say he’d fallen on his feet. Fluent in Russian soon enough, too. They had connections on the mainland, of course, in St Petersburg, and eventually – skipping a few years, obviously – he had his own business there. Importing and exporting, ship’s agency – insurance too, representing Lloyd’s of London even. And he never looked back. By and large, he reckoned, those seamen who dropped him over the side had done him a good turn.’

  ‘And his parents too, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Bob put another lump of sugar in his spoon. ‘He looked after them financially for the rest of their lives.’

  ‘And your mother was Russian, you said?’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t marry until he was over forty, and she wasn’t quite twenty.’

  Very pretty. Elizaveta. Liza, the old man called her. Quite tall, and slim: complete contrast to her husband, who was five feet six inches tall and not much less than that across the shoulders. ‘Beauty and the Beast’ had been his own description of himself and his young wife. Bob could see and hear him now – a thick forefinger tapping a sepia-toned wedding portrait and the hoarse voice grating ‘How could she ’a done it? Tell me that? A lass wi’ her looks, gettin’ wedded to this ape?’

  Solovyev asked him, ‘Your parents are both dead now, I believe you said.’

  ‘Yes. My mother died having a second child – in 1900. I was born in ’91.’

  ‘So you’re only – twenty-seven?’

  He nodded. He knew he looked at least thirty. His size contributed to the illusion – he stood six feet tall in his socks, and he’d inherited his father’s broad shoulders. Not his mother’s beauty, exactly – or fortunately – but he wasn’t quite as square as a barn door, either. As he saw it, they’d each of them given him the best of themselves. But it was true that from early boyhood onwards he’d looked older than his real age. Johnny Pope’s lighthearted ‘age before beauty’ jibe, a day or two ago, was typical – Johnny probably thought of him as an old man, but there were only four years between them. And the Count was murmuring now, ‘I’d have sworn we were contemporaries. But – good Lord, I’m three years your senior…’ Glancing round, then, as a sailor knocked on the steel bulkhead beside the open doorway. One of Zoroaster’s Royal Navy contingent: Bob asked him, ‘Want me, Gilchrist?’

  ‘Captain does, sir. Said to tell you we have Allaverdi in visual communication, he’d be glad if you’d join him on the bridge.’

  * * *

  HMS Allaverdi had a single rather tall, slanting funnel just abaft her bridge, and a rather pretentious (Bob thought) clipper bow. Pretentions to elegance – to the kind of profile that would look all right on some millionaire’s yacht. All that – and a White Ensign too… She was moving out to take station on Zoroaster’s beam. Speed had been reduced to five knots, and Barker – he was senior to the other captain – had ordered a course of due west.

  ‘We’re here.’ Leaning over the chart, he tapped a pencilled fix with the points of a pair of dividers. ‘Course west, five knots. We have fifty miles of patrol-line to cover – that’s this eastern third of it, Babiabut with Emil Nobel and Venture are covering the rest. So – at some point, allowing ourselves time to get to where we need to be this evening, I’ll be turning back – or north-eastward – leaving Allaverdi to carry on alone. She’ll turn about when she’s at the end of our beat, at which time she’ll be in signalling distance of one of the others. Meanwhile we’ll be doing our stuff with you – including retrieving you in your CMB in the early hours – dawn or there
abouts – then meeting Allaverdi again so as to hand you and the tow over to her. She then departs with you for return to Baku. Correct, Bob?’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave the Count a quick translation of what Barker had been saying. Then nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well – what we have to establish now is the time and position for sending you away in the CMB tonight. It was to be roughly midnight and about fifty miles offshore: but nobody’s mentioned which bit of shore yet. So, if we can have that settled now, I can plan our movements and inform Allaverdi, and she can tell the others what’s going on when she’s in sight of them… All right?’

  He nodded. ‘If you’d give us just a minute…’

  Solovyev hadn’t really been brought into it yet, in any detail. For one thing there hadn’t been any good opportunity to get him to a chart, before departure from Baku. But there’d been no need to, either; and the principle of not letting the left hand know what the right hand’s doing wasn’t a bad one – not even when you were 100 per cent sure of the people you were dealing with… Similarly, from a security point of view, passing information to the other ships by lamp was a lot safer than doing it by wireless.

  Bob showed the Russian, ‘Here – this is where we expect to land you – or rather where we’ll transfer you to your rowing-boat. Pope wants to run in at twenty-five knots: so if we allow two hours for the trip, we can leave Zoroaster fifty miles offshore – here, say… And if we start at midnight we’ll have you in there at near enough 2 am, so you’d be on your way by about two-thirty. At the latest – touch wood – so you’ll have a couple of hours of darkness for parking the boat – or whatever – and we have the same length of time for getting back out to this ship… So – that’s all right for us, but will the landing-place suit you?’

  * * *

  ‘The next thing we have to settle, Nikolai Petrovich, is picking you and the others up in a week’s time – or longer, however long it’s going to take you.’

  Pacing the deck, side by side, Allaverdi’s profile four thousand yards abeam to starboard. There wasn’t a lot of movement on the ship, only a gentle rolling as the long swells ran under her from slightly abaft the beam.

  The Count agreed, ‘It’s possible that I could be back with them in one week.’

  ‘So our first rendezvous will be seven nights from this coming one. Calling tonight night 1, it’ll be night 8. Midnight, at the same place we leave you, wherever that turns out to be. All right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes…’

  ‘But if you don’t appear at midnight, we’ll wait for one hour exactly, – until 1 am. All right?’

  ‘And the next night—’

  ‘No. Every second night. So counting from now it’d be nights 8, 10, 12, and so on.’

  ‘It could take as long as two weeks, I suppose.’

  ‘All right. Nights 14 and 16 as well.’

  ‘Could you then leave a gap of one more week and try just one more time – night 23, say?’

  ‘Very well. But you accept that that would be your last chance – as far as this way out is concerned?’

  Putting his mind to it. Stroking his jaw – it had become a habit – and gazing out towards Allaverdi. Then he shrugged as he looked round at Bob. ‘It’s impossible to be at all certain, obviously. But I should guess if I don’t get back to you in three weeks, Robert Aleksand’ich, you could forget it.’

  * * *

  Over lunch in the saloon-wardroom mess, listening to the Count in conversation with the Zoroaster’s Russian first lieutenant, and hearing him put some fairly pointed questions to him in the course of it, Bob remembered that Johnny Pope had asked him recently ‘Do the Bolsheviks have clever spies?’

  Suppose they did, he thought: and suppose Count Nikolai Petrovich Solovyev was one. Even using his real name and legitimate title: one had heard of cases of highborn Russians saving their skins or their children’s by working as informers amongst their own kind. In point of fact the two he’d heard of had been women, but this didn’t exclude the possibility of there being a few male aristos at it too.

  That would justify one’s earlier feeling of – uncertainty…

  Sheer nonsense, probably, and grossly unfair to him. But – having started, think it through… For instance, it was unquestionable that Bicherakov had sent Solovyev down to Baku from Petrovsk: and Bicherakov’s loyalties weren’t in question, even though he had got himself and his Cossacks to Baku initially by claiming to be pro-Bolshevik, so that the then Bolshevik government in Baku had appointed him commander-in-chief – realizing only later how completely they’d been fooled… But had Bicherakov been shown any proof that the Count had come to him from General Denikin?

  Probably not. He wouldn’t have telegraphic communications with Denikin’s headquarters either. Bicherakov would have taken Solovyev on his own assurances: just as Dunsterville in turn had accepted him on Bicherakov’s. Dunsterville would certainly not have checked – in fact he’d told the Commodore that he didn’t intend referring the business to Baghdad or London because of the security risks that might be involved in doing so. He’d added that in any case it came within his own brief, there was no need for any consultation; and behind this, Bob had guessed, he mightn’t have been entirely disinterested in the prospect of coming up with such a brilliant fait accompli – the Tsar’s daughters snatched to safety and now under the protection of the British flag.

  Grintsev, this steamer’s first lieutenant, was telling the Count, ‘Four of our ships are on patrol at all times, yes. Across this narrower part – Cape Bryansk to Fort Aleksandrovsk – and from time to time we make a sweep farther to the north. You see, as long as we can hold the Caspian south of this line, we can prevent any movement towards the east and also protect the army’s flank. As you’ll appreciate, all the coastline between Petrovsk and Baku is open to bombardment from the sea.’

  ‘What if Baku had to be evacuated?’

  ‘Well – Johnny Turk would have his hands on the oil, for one thing. Or the Germans would – comes to the same thing. You’d have Germans in Baku within hours – they’re just sitting in Astrakhan, our Bolshevik friends’ honoured guests… But we’d still have Petrovsk – and more importantly Krasnovodsk, which is an excellent port and base. And the British in Krasnovodsk are in greater strength – with no Turks besieging them either – so the position’s secure enough, we’d hold on there and we’d still command this sea.’

  ‘And Enzeli, you’d still have.’

  ‘Certainly. But – on the subject of this patrol – yet another benefit is that we prevent the Bolsheviks making any effective use of the submarines which they have at Astrakhan. If they could operate south of us here, in deeper water, they could be a thorn in our flesh. But as the sea in the north is extremely shallow, they can’t dive anywhere up there. Consequently if they tried to deploy southward we’d see them coming, and – well, blow them out of the water. On the surface a submarine’s a clumsy thing; it has its torpedoes, of course, but it’s slow and extremely vulnerable…’

  The Count nodding, taking it all in. Bob thinking, We could be landing a spy tonight. Having wined and dined him and briefed him…

  ‘Something troubling you, Robert Aleksand’ich?’

  The green eyes had swung to meet his own sombre, thoughtful gaze. Almost as if reading those suspicions.

  Not that one actually believed…

  He shrugged: ‘Just listening to you. Kyril Ivan’ich is right about the submarines – where they are, they’re useless.’

  ‘How many are there? And for that matter, what other ships?’

  Direct question – no subtlety at all. It would be of advantage to the Bolsheviks to know how accurate an assessment the Allies had of their naval strength. Bob shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen anything recently on that subject, come to think of it.’ He added – before Grintsev might come up with a contradiction of this statement – ‘With the Volga giving them a link to the Black Sea, ships come and go quite frequently, you see, it’s hard to
know from one day to another.’

  ‘But their morale—’ Grintsev’s mouth bulged with mutton stew – ‘is extremely low. We know this for certain.’

  ‘What about the Russian Caspian flotilla? For instance, the gunboat that brought me down from Petrovsk?’

  ‘That’s another animal altogether.’ Grintsev had begun to answer, and Bob left it to him. ‘One has heard that some of those crews have Bolshevik sympathies. In particular amongst the engineroom personnel…’

  * * *

  Solovyev had come up with all the right questions, Bob thought. On the other hand, you could also say they were questions which might have occurred to any intelligent observer. And once you started on this kind of fantasy – well, you could very soon convince yourself.

  Too late to start worrying about it now, anyway. If he was a Bolshevik agent, by this stage he’d be laughing up his sleeve. Maybe he’d laugh out loud, when he was rowing away into the darkness.

  But he wasn’t. Couldn’t be…

  It was mid-afternoon now. Bob was again at the rail at the after end of the promenade deck, smoking a cigarette and watching the CMB, which had more movement on her now as she slammed across the swell in Zoroaster’s wake. Zoroaster herself was rolling quite a bit. There’d be a change of course soon – at 4 pm, they’d be altering to north-east, the start of the transit up towards the coast; she’d be heading right into it then, which should actually be less uncomfortable for the CMB, better than all that rolling. He guessed that Messrs Henderson, Willoughby and Keane might by this time be quite eagerly looking forward to the midnight change-round.

  So was he, for that matter. With nothing to do now except wait around… He’d been on the bridge with Eric Barker for a while, then found Pope down here and they’d chatted for a while – flotilla business, and the war, and so on. Johnny had gone below now for a nap – as good a way as any of killing time, and an example Bob thought he might follow, when he’d finished his cigarette.