by Roger Bax
We now had to decide what we should do about Neva. The thought had flashed through my mind that we might all transfer to her and make a quick dash for Stockholm at fifteen knots, but I soon realized that there was too much of a sea, and anyway we found that there wasn’t enough petrol aboard her to reach neutral territory. We discussed the advisability of taking her with us, but we had one perfectly good boat and there seemed no point in burdening ourselves with another. On the other hand it would clearly be a mistake to leave her floating and derelict, for the Russians would find her and guess that we had encountered her.
The only thing, then, was to scuttle her. We brought the lieutenant aboard Dawn, and I mounted guard while Joe and Denny prepared Neva for her last trip. The lieutenant watched our preparations glumly. It seemed to me that he was more concerned about Neva’s fate than about Kleinman’s. He appeared to be losing quite a lot of blood from the pellet wounds in his left hand and arm, and I called to Svetlana to bring bandages. She made quite a passable job of the dressing and the lieutenant looked grateful.
Meanwhile, Denny had transferred Neva’s cans of spare petrol to Dawn and had helped Joe stow in Neva’s cabin every object that might float and so provide a clue to her fate. When all was done Joe unscrewed the water inlet pipe from the engine and let the sea rush in. It seemed ages before she began to settle, and I kept glancing back towards Tallinn, expecting that at any moment another hull would appear on the horizon.
When it became clear that Neva would last only a few minutes longer, Joe gave the order to get under way. I put Dawn on her old course and opened the throttle. We had gone barely half a mile before the launch was engulfed by the waves and quietly disappeared. None of us had liked sinking her, but this wasn’t a time for sentiment. I hoped we should have no occasion to need the turn of speed she might have given us.
We ourselves had been very fortunate. Apart from the broken bowsprit, which we should have to repair before we could do any more sailing, the only injuries we had suffered were a few holes in the sail and in the sides of the cabin and some smashed crockery. It was a bullet going through one of the cupboards that had made Svetlana cry out.
The first thing now was to get Joe into bed. He was rocking on his feet and I think he was asleep before his head hit the pillow. I kept the tiller and Denny stayed out in the cockpit to keep an eye on the lieutenant. Denny seemed a bit shaken. He certainly hadn’t intended to drown anybody and the thought of it depressed him. I pointed out that if it had been necessary for someone to drown Kleinman was the ideal man, but he didn’t seem to think that was very funny.
He leaned against the bulwark and gazed with cold anger at the sodden lieutenant. I saw that we should have to do something about Stepan. Whatever shock we had had, his shock had been much greater. Though the day was warm he was beginning to shiver. His face was bluish-white and he looked the personification of misery.
I suggested some brandy, and after he’d taken a stiff shot he began to look a bit better. “I suppose we’ll have to give him some clothes,” said Denny grudgingly. He seemed to be holding the lieutenant responsible for everything, including Kleinman’s death. “‘Don’t start anything,” he said warningly as he turned to go into the cabin—though the warning was certainly unnecessary. Presently he emerged with the colonel’s uniform which I had taken off the night before. Stepan stared at it in some astonishment—I dare say he thought we’d murdered a colonel in order to get it. I could see he didn’t much like the idea of putting it on, and anyway it proved too tight for him. In the end the only thing we could find to fit him was one of Denny’s own khaki shirts, which he had to leave unbuttoned down the front, and a pair of khaki shorts. Denny flung him a towel and he stripped, dried himself off, and struggled into the khaki. He looked much better that way. Denny bundled up the old uniform and threw it overboard. He had come to dislike it very much.
Stepan, looking rather wistful, watched it disappear in our wake. He was still very subdued. I had seen the same look on the faces of German prisoners on the Don, dragged up in the middle of the night by the Russians to be interviewed by a bunch of correspondents. They had expected to be shot, and couldn’t quite believe that they were not going to be. I don’t think Stepan foresaw anything quite so drastic, for we’d shown a measure of goodwill by giving him some clothes, but he couldn’t be sure. There was plenty on his conscience, in any case, for it wasn’t his fault that we were still alive. He kept looking from one to another of us as though trying to read our intentions, and every now and again he gazed with renewed perplexity at the fore part of our ship which had done so much damage so mysteriously. He couldn’t make us out at all, and his bewilderment had increased when Denny had started talking to him in Russian. We must have seemed very different from the two English gentlemen whom he and Kleinman had entertained on board Neva.
Denny didn’t help to set Stepan’s mind at ease, for he was still fuming. He said: “You’re a damned pirate. You deserve to be hanged.” Stepan eyed the masthead gloomily.
“I believe we’ve a right to hang you,” said Denny, working himself up.
“We could look it up in the book,” I said. Now that the crisis was past I couldn’t feel any great animosity against the lieutenant.
But Denny’s sense of justice was outraged. “You deliberately tried to murder us all. A cut-throat, that’s what you are.” He was delving deep into the recesses of his Russian vocabulary and I was surprised at the number of recondite words he knew. That, no doubt, was what came of sleeping with a teacher of languages.
Stepan shifted his big bulk uneasily on the deck. He said, “I obeyed orders.”
“At Nuremberg,” said Denny, “that was no defence. You’re guilty of a crime against humanity. Piracy!”
“Kleinman said you were breaking the law yourselves,” said Stepan obstinately. “And if I had disobeyed him he would have had me shot.”
“Was he N. K.V.D?” I asked.
The sort of look came over Stepan’s face which I had often seen before in Russia; a sort of conscious blankness, an automatic defensive mechanism against the sound of the unmentionable. Finally he nodded.
I thought I’d better explain. I said: “We never intended any harm to your country, you know. These women are our wives—Russian girls. We married them when we were in Russia during the war. Denny, here, was a soldier—an ally of yours. Do you remember that we were allies? I was a correspondent—and a good friend of your country. Your Government wanted to keep our wives in Russia. We thought we were entitled to fetch them out. That’s what all the trouble’s been about.”
Stepan seemed to be thinking that over. He stared at the deck. Presently he said, “No doubt it is natural to want one’s wife.” He smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. “Russian girls are very attractive.” He was beginning to sound more like the Stepan we had known in Neva’s cabin. He said, “How did you succeed in getting them away?”
I couldn’t tell him that. “You’ll go back to Russia and tell your beastly N. K.V.D.” I said, “and then more innocent people will be sent to Kazakstan.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“You tell us something,” said Denny. “What did you do when you found all your petrol had gone?”
Stepan grinned. He said: “We went back to our base near Porkkala and got some more. Kleinman was very angry.”
“I bet he was,” said Denny, thawing a little. “That was a good party. Did you have a headache in the morning?”
“A small headache. Kleinman had a bad headache. He was very ill. He was afraid, too, about what might happen to him.”
“Because he’d let us go?”
“Yes.”
“How did you find us so soon?”
Stepan threw out his hands. “It was simple. When we woke in the morning and discovered you had gone Kleinman said you were foreign spies. We had thought perhaps you were. There are many boats in the Gulf from Sweden and Finland which try to make contact with enemies of the Soviet people, an
d it was our work to prevent them. We did not know what part of the coast you were going to, but we knew that you would have to come out through the Gulf. We patrolled where we thought you would have to be, and there you were. Perhaps it was luck.”
“It was bad luck for Kleinman.”
Stepan looked down his nose. “He could be spared.”
“You didn’t like him?”
Stepan shook his head. “We have a saying, ‘Watch the goat from the front, the horse from behind, and the bad man from all sides.’ He was that bad man.”
“You seemed friendly enough.”
He shrugged again. “A wise man does not quarrel with his chief. I did not like him and I did not like his work.” He smiled. “I prefer coal-mining. It is cleaner.”
We were getting a new light on Stepan’s character. Unless he was a good deal deeper than he appeared there was no real malice in him at all. He was just one of the millions of Russians who’d got caught up in a machine.
It was almost noon. Far ahead I could just make out the hazy outline of the Finnish coast near Hango. In another couple of hours or so we should be out of the Gulf. We were making fine progress, though I didn’t like the idea of using up so much petrol.
I said, “After lunch we’ll have to get that bowsprit mended.”
Stepan looked with renewed interest at the broken spar. He said: “What was it that hit us? You have a gun—or bombs, perhaps?”
“Not bombs, Stepan. We had a gun.” I told him about the bowsprit and he was fascinated.
“Perhaps I can help you to mend it,” he said.
“So that we can shoot at another Russian boat?”
He considered. “Well,” he said, “perhaps not.”
“You’ve got to keep your record clean,” I told him. “It’s not our worry, of course—you’re just an old pirate to us—but you’ll have to have a good story for the N.K.V.D.”
He said. “What are you going to do with me?”
“If you give us any trouble, we shall probably throw you overboard. If you behave yourself we shall hand you over to the Swedish police at Stockholm. After you’ve been held in jail for a while they’ll probably get in touch with the Soviet Embassy and you’ll be repatriated. I don’t see what else we can do. We can hardly land you on Russian soil.”
Stepan nodded. He looked a bit gloomy and I supposed that the prospect of cooling his heels in prison while the diplomats got busy didn’t much appeal to him. But he had no other suggestions to make. He sat with his head in his hands, apparently in deep thought.
Presently Marya came out into the cockpit and said that Svetlana was still not feeling very well, but that she herself was hungry. Denny said that he was, too, and went in to prepare a meal. The sea was a good deal quieter than it had been in the early morning, and cooking presented no great difficulty. Before long an appetizing smell was coming from the galley and Stepan raised his head, sniffed, and grinned.
“I’m not sure that we feed pirates,” I said. His face fell and Marya said, “Oy yoy, Philip,” and looked reproachful. Stepan was as teasable as a small child.
I felt it would be a pity to wake Joe, but it seemed that he was already stirring. His sleep had been satisfying, if short, for after he had sluiced his face he looked as fresh as ever. He came into the cockpit and I gave him a short report. He took a look at the distant coast through binoculars, gazed all round the horizon, and glanced at the petrol gauge.
“No more trouble?” he asked. “No more Russians?”
“Not a sign. It’s too good to be true.”
I lashed the tiller and we crowded into the cabin for a good meal. We put Stepan between the two girls and he looked after both of them. With a pang of something ridiculously like jealousy I noticed that Marya seemed more at ease with him than she did with me. I was beginning to hate these cramped quarters and total lack of privacy.
We’d hardly begun to eat when the note of our engine seemed to change—and then I realized that it was the drone of a ’plane I could hear. Joe told the others to sit tight, and he and I crept cautiously into the cockpit. The ’plane came straight at us, and for one dreadful moment I thought it was going to drop a bomb. But as it flattened out at little more than masthead height I saw that it was an old single-seater reconnaissance monoplane without armament. I could see the pilot leaning out to look at us. He banked and flew round us twice, and then he turned and made straight for the Estonian coast.
That took our appetites away completely. It had been such a businesslike sortie. The Russians had obviously fitted all the bits of the simple jigsaw together and had known exactly where to look for us.
Stepan didn’t make us feel any more cheerful. He said soberly: “Before evening they will come for you. If you resist you will be sunk.”
On such matters Stepan clearly spoke with authority. I said, “What do you think they’ll do?”
He said: “I think they’ll send a gunboat out of Riga, perhaps, and cut you off before dusk. In the morning there’ll be no trace of you.”
“There’ll be no trace of you, either,” said Denny.
“That is so,” said Stepan.
Denny was getting hot under the collar again. “It’s an outrage. I don’t believe they’d dare …” The sentence tailed off lamely. The facts were as plain to Denny as to the rest of us. If they’d only used pistols before, it was because that was all they had had.
Stepan was realistic. He said: “Who can stop them? If you had a destroyer in the Gulf, that would be different. But you have not. It is safe enough for them. You will not be able to complain. You will be dead. They will naturally not write to the newspapers about it. It has happened before.”
I looked at him curiously. It was his constant use of the word ‘they’ that caught my attention. I had heard it so much in Russia. ‘They’ was Authority, remote and rather terrible. It seemed to me that Stepan spoke of it with no great affection. He had become a different man since Kleinman’s death.
Denny said: “We’re in a trap. If we keep going, they’ll catch us. If we go back into the Gulf it’s only a matter of time before they find us.”
“We can’t possibly go back,” I said. “They can spot us anywhere with that ’plane, and the deeper we are in the Gulf the more free they’ll feel to shoot. Our only chance is the open sea, even if it’s a slim one. What do you think, Joe?”
Joe motioned towards Stepan. “Ask him what he’d do if he were in our place.”
I put the question to Stepan, who was looking far from happy. He thought a little and then he said: “I would go north and hide. To the islands.”
“And run into another Neva!” said Denny. “No thank you.”
“What does he say?” asked Joe impatiently. I translated, and Joe slowly shook his head. “I don’t much like it, either. Those islands looked pretty tricky to me. We don’t know the channels and we shouldn’t know where to lie up. They’d spot us from the air.”
I told Stepan what Joe had said. He crumbled a bit of bread thoughtfully and said: “I know the islands well. For six months I have been patrolling there. Once you are deep inside the archipelago you are safe. It is necessary only to approach the right spot.”
I said, “Look here, Stepan, whose side are you on?”
“I have no choice,” he replied. “Like you, I do not want to be sunk. To be in the water once in a day is enough.”
“Let’s have a look at the chart,” I said. We opened it up and spread it out on the table. I pencilled in our position, very roughly. Due north of us, and perhaps twenty miles away, the islands lay off the Finnish coast in a belt seven or eight miles deep. There were a few big ones, near the mainland, that were named; there were hundreds of unnamed smaller ones, and in addition there were innumerable dots representing no more than large rocks.
Stepan took Joe’s pencil and drew a circle about three inches in diameter. “Inside this circle,” he said, “there are perhaps a thousand islands. Except for an occasional yacht, no one ever vis
its them. They are inhabited only by birds. Some are wooded, some are bare, but I know where there is good cover. I am a skilful sailor—you need have no fear.”
I don’t think any of us doubted his sailing abilities, but his good faith was another matter. He had been detached from one set of loyalties—could we trust his conversion? Then I remembered that he was only trying to save his skin. For all I knew there might be a Russian base inside the islands, but it would hardly help him to take us to it. He had good reason to know that we should put up a fight with whatever we’d got handy. He could hardly expect to get away himself in a scrap, for we should be three to one against him, and if he led us into a trap we should obviously deal with him whatever happened to us and the boat.
Apart from the question of his trustworthiness the plan had everything to commend it. We were less than three hours’ steaming from the islands, and with luck we should be snugged down before dark. Besides, there was no apparent alternative. Stepan might be exaggerating the danger of a gunboat, but that ’ plane had certainly looked very purposeful.
We discussed the problem for a while. It wasn’t an easy decision to take. For once Joe didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind. His faith in the freedom of the seas had been shattered, and yet I knew he couldn’t quite believe that we would be attacked again. He suggested that we put it to the vote.
I explained the alternatives, with what I thought was horrible clarity, in English and in Russian. Marya said she thought Stepan could be trusted, and he gave her a little bow. Svetlana said the sea made her feel ill, anyway. Denny was for the islands, and I thought that on the whole they were the lesser risk. Joe agreed.
“So the islands it is,” I said. I went out into the cockpit and altered course for the north.
The greatest danger now was that the ’plane would come out again and report our change of course. It would have been an obvious precaution, but it wasn’t taken. No doubt the Russians realized that we couldn’t get very far in an hour or two, and felt quite confident of their ability to intercept us by sea at their pleasure. Still, it was an anxious time for us. All afternoon we were straining our ears for that tell-tale drone in the sky, and there were several false alarms. The sound of an aeroplane engine is the easiest thing to imagine when you are expecting it.
