At the very least, information about their intentions in the Ukraine, where they’d been heavily involved – still were, in the Odessa-Kherson region.
Then as to her interest in so to speak one’s own person – well, as most naval activity on this Black Sea coast at the present time was not French but British, it might well occur to her to cast her net a little wider. Especially if she thought she had her sights on a sitting duck?
Having perhaps already tried it on Ashmore, and found him too tough a nut to crack?
Not so flattering. And distinctly possible. He frowned, fastening the canvas holdall into which he’d packed the things he needed. He picked it up, opened the door – quietly, this time – and went quickly down the stairs.
*
He’d been ashore less than an hour, and had the luck when he got down to the landing steps to find the cruiser’s launch there, loading cases of wine that had come by lorry from Massandra. The launch’s crewmen were stacking the cases in the boat’s forepart, under the supervision of the wardroom messman, Mr Rogers.
‘Not all for the wardroom, sir, this isn’t. The Tokai there, that’s the skipper’s.’ The little man smacked his lips. ‘Lovely drop, is that Tokai.’
‘Yes.’ Bob nodded. ‘I remember.’
Rogers glanced at him oddly. But he didn’t bother to explain that his father had introduced him to Crimean Tokai when he’d been still a young boy. Bob’s father, Alexander Cowan, had been only a boy himself when he’d arrived in Russia – at Kronstadt, near what had then been called St Petersburg and was now Petrograd. He’d arrived as a stowaway, in rags and without a word of Russian, but by the time of Bob’s birth in 1891 he’d built up a thriving business – import and export, shipping and marine insurance.
The old man was dead now. He’d drowned, last year, when taking passage home from Archangel to Rosyth in the cruiser Splendid. From 1914 onwards he’d been attached to the British embassy in Petrograd, with responsibility for the reception and documentation at this end of Allied war supplies to Russia, and they’d sent him home last year for medical reasons. ‘Getting a bit of trouble from the old ticker,’ he’d written to Bob before embarking in HMS Splendid: she’d gone down either to a mine or a torpedo, taking Alexander Cowan with her.
Bob and his father had been very close. All the more so perhaps because Bob’s Russian mother, who’d been less than half the old man’s age and the pride and passion of his life, had died in giving birth to a stillborn second child, when Bob had been just nine.
He’d been a marvellous man and a wonderful father. Great character, enormous heart. Bob knew that if he ever came halfway to measuring up to that man, he wouldn’t have done badly.
A touch on his elbow: ‘Ready, sir?’
Mr Rogers – waking him out of his thoughts, drawing his attention to the fact they were just coming alongside Caledonian’s gangway. Deep in recollection of his father, all of it sparked by mention of that wine, he’d had no awareness of embarking or of the short trip across the grey, slightly loppy anchorage. Now the coxswain had put his engine astern, and a moment later the launch bumped gently against the gangway’s slatted lower platform, bowman and sternsheetman neatly taking hold with their boathooks.
‘Thank you, Cox’n.’ A side-boy – quarterdeck messenger – came nipping down to take the holdall; Bob went up the gangway, saluting as he stepped aboard. The officer of the watch, a young lieutenant, told him as he too saluted, ‘Captain Fellows would like to see you, sir. As soon as you got back, he said.’
‘Very good.’ Spirits rising sharply: Colonel Temple must have come up with something – at last. ‘Thank you… Could my case be put in the Captain’s sea-cabin?’
‘Of course.’ A glance at the side-boy. ‘Bellamy—’
Aye aye, sir!’
Down one deck, now, by way of a hatch set under the jutting barrel of the six-inch gun, and then right aft.
Thinking there might be some truth in the old saying that a watched pot never boiled: better to turn your back on it, as he’d just done by going ashore. Rattling down the steel ladder and turning aft on the main deck, feeling a lot brighter suddenly, heartened by the prospect of getting a move on now… He acknowledged the Royal Marine sentry’s salute, knocked on the cuddy door, heard Captain Andrew Fellows’ loud ‘Come in!’
As he entered the cabin he removed his cap, pushed it under his arm. ‘Wanted to see me, sir?’
‘Yes, Cowan.’ Caledonian’s skipper was a heavily-built man with a reddish face and ginger hair. ‘Yes, indeed. Look, take a pew.’ Hospitable wave of the hand towards a chintz-covered armchair: there were three, and a settee, also a desk in the starboard after corner to which he’d gone now, to extract a sheet of pink signal-pad from a folder.
‘This came in cypher, of course. They’ve only just unravelled it. It’s what you’ve been waiting for – but I’m damned if I can see what you or anyone else can do about it. Eh?’
Bob took it from him, and accepted the invitation to sit down. Seeing at a glance that the message was from SO (I) Constantinople, addressed to Caledonian for BNLO Sevastopol.
INFORMATION RECEIVED IS THAT VOLUNTEER NURSING AIDES KATHERINE REID AND MARY PILKINGTON WERE SERVING IN LETUCHKA NO. 7 REPEAT SEVEN ON THE KHARKOV FRONT AS RECENTLY AS LAST WEEK NOVEMBER. CONFIRMATION NOW UNOBTAINABLE OWING TO SEVERANCE OF COMMUNICATIONS WITH THAT FRONT. INDICATIONS ARE KHARKOV OUTFLANKED BY BOLSHEVIK FORCES, VOLUNTEER ARMY STILL HOLDING TWO DAYS AGO BUT WITHDRAWAL AND GENERAL RETREAT PROBABLY INEVITABLE. ONLY ACCESS FOR PURPOSES OF ANY RESCUE MISSION PRESUMABLY RAIL FROM NOVOROSSISK VIA ROSTOV, BUT DISTANCE AND TIME FACTORS SEEM TO MAKE SUCH ATTEMPT FUTILE. IT SHOULD ALSO BE NOTED THAT BRITISH MILITARY MISSIONS ON THE DON HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO WITHDRAW TO EKATERINODAR IN READINESS FOR EVACUATION THROUGH NOVOROSSISK. UNLESS INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO YOU LOCALLY SUGGESTS ANY VIABLE ALTERNATIVE YOUR RETURN HERE BY FIRST AVAILABLE SAILING IS THEREFORE AUTHORIZED. TIME OF ORIGIN…
A letuchka was a mobile field hospital. Literally, ‘flying column’. But how on earth, he wondered, could those girls who’d allegedly deserted from their nurses’ training at the Simferopol base hospital have turned up in a frontline unit?
Deserting to the Front?
He met Captain Fellows’ quizzical stare. ‘Not too good, sir.’
‘I’d say that might be something of an understatement, Cowan.’
‘Except that we’ve seen it before more than once – advances petering out, other side pull themselves together—’
‘What I’ve heard referred to as the Seesaw Syndrome. Yes. With Tsarytsin as the most dramatic example, perhaps. Wangel taking the place, then driven out, reoccupying it the very next day. But that was thanks to the RAF and two or three British-manned tanks. And look at what else your Colonel Temple’s telling us – that we’re evacuating, for God’s sake!’ He shook his head. ‘What he’s really saying, Cowan, is there’s a complete rout developing. And between you and me, much as I hate to say this, I wouldn’t want any daughter of mine to be where those young women are.’
Bob looked down at the signal again. Wondering whether the last line but one, that ‘Unless information available to you locally’ line, might not have been Colonel Temple’s paraphrasing of Cowan, can’t you for God’s sake see some way to save their skins?
He let out a long breath as he looked up. ‘May I take a little time over this, sir?’
‘Time?’ Fellows looked surprised. ‘Well – I suppose… Time to do what, though?’
‘Well – might there be any maps on board, sir? Shoreside maps, as distinct from charts?’
‘There’s a Times atlas, at any rate. Hackett keeps it in his cabin, I think. Oh, you could try Meyrick – Captain of Marines, he may have something… What’s in your mind?’
‘I’d like to see where that railway runs, sir – the line from Novorossisk through Rostov. It must turn up northward there, I suppose. But I hardly know what we’re talking about, at the moment. And as Colonel Temple does query whether the
re may be ways or means…’
‘Look into it, certainly. But don’t take longer than you have to. And – Cowan. Better keep this business about withdrawal of the missions under your hat, eh?’
*
Captain Meyrick RM had a few Russian military maps which he’d scrounged here and there, but none that helped with these present researches. Bob went on to find Hackett, the navigating officer, who did have a Times atlas. Although the scale was very small, on a plate covering the whole of southern Russia it showed that the railway line to Kharkov, running west from Rostov, turned inland from the coast at a place called Taganrog.
The atlas gave no indication, of course, but one knew that most of the Sea of Azov was extremely shallow. Royal Navy monitors and two Russian barges with six-inch guns were deployed more or less permanently along the western seaboard to prevent Bolshevik infiltration of the Crimea from that direction, and British destroyers had also been operating there, their orders being to destroy all vessels transporting Bolshevik troops or capable of being used as transports. In the course of this, Bob remembered from a recent intelligence report, Parthian and Forester had both been hit by gunfire from the shore. They’d suffered no casualties or serious damage, and had continued their patrols – at a safer range from the coast – but the incident was indicative of the presence and strength of Red infiltrators.
The main problem would be navigational, anyway. Especially inside the Gulf of Taganrog. Unless the Russians had had dredgers working in recent years, which seemed unlikely.
Hackett asked him – from the bunk, where he’d started in a sitting position but was now prone with his eyes shut – ‘Solved your problem, have you, Cowan?’
Bob glanced round at him. Thinking – in reference to their earlier conversation – that if curiosity didn’t kill this cat, Plymouth gin and bitters might well do so, in the long run. He told him, ‘Hardly. Oh, I do have the answer to one question.’ Back at the map again… ‘The problem we’re left with, though, is first how to locate and then physically to extract our governesses from somewhere up here – he’d put a finger on Kharkov, at the same time tilting the heavy atlas so Hackett could see it, if he could manage to raise his head – ’where the front is said to be crumbling, Bolshy breakthrough imminent if not already achieved.’
‘Good God. For “needles in haystacks” read “needles in burning bloody haystacks”…’
It wasn’t a bad analogy. And in the light of all the known facts of the situation, the answer to Temple’s query was surely that it was too damn late to do anything at all… Hackett asked him – going so far as to sit up, then sliding his legs off the bunk – ‘What are you contemplating – putting some kind of rescue party ashore, in that gulf?’
‘Not so much contemplating as – well, investigating possibility of… But that’s the railway to Kharkov, and if one had to get up that way it’d be a lot better to be landed at Taganrog than to start right down here at Novorossisk, having then to chug all the way up to Rostov. A couple of hundred miles – and if you know anything about Russian trains, at any rate in present conditions…’
‘I can imagine. But whether anything that floats could get in to Taganrog—’
‘That’s the next question. Exactly. Perhaps we can have a look at the chart?’
‘Of course. But I can tell you now it’d be a deuce of a tricky job, getting in there. Except perhaps in a CMB. Which we don’t have, of course. Unless you could have one shipped up from Batoum?’
A CMB was a coastal motorboat: very fast, and drawing only a couple of feet of water. Bob shook his head. ‘Time wouldn’t allow, would it? Even if they’d spare us one. Chartroom, please?’
‘Right. Right.’ Hackett preceded him out into the cabin flat. ‘This is what you were talking to our tame leatherneck about, was it? Landing party at Taganrog?’
He was jumping to the conclusion that any landing party would be composed of Royal Marines. A fairly natural assumption, perhaps – if one completely misunderstood the situation and the requirements. Bob wondered whether Colonel Temple might have studied maps and/or charts and pondered this very problem, and perhaps concluded that Taganrog would be inaccessible. But he certainly wouldn’t have been thinking of anything like putting a platoon of Royal Marines ashore. He’d have had in mind a one-man infiltration, the one man being – for God’s sake – Lieutenant-Commander Robert Cowan, RNR. Merely because said Robert Cowan had done something of very broadly the same kind on that one previous occasion – in totally different circumstances – and had the luck to get away with it.
Should have had the sense, he thought, to put in for discharge. Might have been home by now – resting on what might be termed one’s laurels. Facing, no doubt, all sorts of new problems – but none of this kind.
Simple solution, anyway. Take Temple’s last sentence at its face value: YOUR RETURN HERE BY FIRST AVAILABLE SAILING IS THEREFORE AUTHORIZED…
Why not snatch at it?
Meanwhile he hadn’t answered the navigator, who, undeterred, added over his shoulder as he went up the first of several ladders into the bridge superstructure, ‘Come to think of it, a man who might help you, Cowan – straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak – is Terrapin’s captain. Fellow by the name of Everard.’
‘I know him, as it happens. I took passage in Terrapin from the Bosporus. But is he coming here?’
‘Came in early this afternoon. She’s alongside the oiler there. Or was – maybe at anchor now. Surprised you didn’t see her when you came off from shore, you’d have passed within a couple of cables’ lengths of her. Anyway, she’s just come from patrol in the Sea of Azov, Everard should be up to date on – oh, not the Taganrog gulf, I dare say, but he’d have a much better idea than you or I…’
So all right: he’d pick Everard’s brains. As long as he could get hold of him, if Terrapin wasn’t leaving as soon as she’d refuelled… Here and now, anyway – in Caledonian’s, chartroom – Hackett was leafing through the currently-in-use chart folio. Extracting first The Euxine or Black Sea, chart 2214, flipping it on the table where Bob opened it.
Not bad… But Hackett was pulling out another. ‘Here – this is the one you want. However you pronounce that…’
Azovskoe More: the Sea of Azov. The Taganrog Gulf alone occupied as much space as the whole Azov Sea did on the other. He checked quickly and saw that soundings were shown in feet, not fathoms as on the smaller-scale chart; then that off Taganrog itself depths varied between six and nine feet.
More than ample for a CMB, but a destroyer would need a minimum of twelve feet, two fathoms. And the nearest to the town – a railway town, for sure, the chart showed the line looping in from the east and curving away northward – the nearest point at which you’d have that much water would be about four miles offshore.
‘Haven’t been any recent corrections, that I can see.’
Hackett frowned, resenting the suggestion that he might have been lax in his duties as navigator. ‘If there had been, Cowan, they’d be on it.’
‘Wouldn’t doubt it. All I’m thinking is there could have been silting, less water than it shows, even.’
Because the mouths of the river Don were only a dozen miles southeast from Taganrog, and the Donets about ten miles due east. Close in to those river mouths were sandbanks with no depths of water shown at all, only the warning Banks extended seaward.
So say five miles offshore. Then land by seaboat. If anyone’ll take you there in the first place, which they probably will not… But in any case – he caught himself up on this as he straightened from the chart – wouldn’t the best outcome be to find it was not a practical proposition?
From one’s own point of view – yes. But from those two girls’: and their families’ at home…
He asked Hackett, ‘Any idea how long Terrapin will be here?’
*
‘Only for the night.’ Lieutenant Nick Everard, Royal Navy, answered that question in his day-cabin on board the destroyer about h
alf an hour later. By this time Terrapin was at anchor, having completed fuelling and left the oiler. He told Bob, ‘Sailing 0800 tomorrow – for the Bosporus, en route to Marmara to join the anti-gunrunning patrol there.’ He frowned, added half to himself, ‘Not for very long, I hope…’
Everard was about four years younger than Bob. In fact he looked surprisingly youthful to have command of a modern destroyer. But the ribbons of the DSO and DSC on his shoulder went some way to explaining it: and he looked hard, fit, with a hint of obstinacy behind present affability. His only response to Bob’s rather diffident comment on those medals, during the journey here from Constantinople, had been to mutter that he’d been lucky – ‘in the right places at the right time, as they say…’
He asked now, ‘Why? Want to come along with us?’
Bob nodded. ‘Might take you up on that. If – well, what I’ve come to ask you about—’
‘You’d be welcome.’ Everard glanced at the time: he was due on board Caledonian at six, having proposed ‘making his number’ – in other words paying a duty visit to Captain Fellows, the senior naval officer in the port – earlier than that, and in reply getting an RPC – Request the Pleasure of your Company – for 1800. It was just after 1730 now. He nodded to Bob. ‘Are very welcome… You’ve come to ask me something? Sit down, ask away… Like a drink?’
‘No, thank you. But – when you brought me here, I think I told you that I was being sent to dig out some missing governesses?’
‘Why, so you did!’ A wide grin… ‘And have you found ’em?’
‘Not exactly. First thing was I had to wait for some mysterious character who was supposed to be bringing me the information we needed; and he came, all right, but when he arrived they shot him dead. However—’
Look to the Wolves Page 3
