They were out in the road and the other Hun was shutting the gates. Herman sent the big motor trundling along the narrow curve of street. Nick added more advice: ‘And keep well closed up. If anyone questions us, say we’re looking for the store for General Liman von Sanders’s baggage. Naturally you’ll do all the talking, if any has to be done.’
Burtenshaw, white-faced, turned and looked at him. ‘You don’t honestly think we can get away with this, do you?’
‘Not get away with it?’ Nick hoped his astonishment looked real. ‘But why shouldn’t we?’
The Marine shrugged. He looked away again, keeping his mouth shut tight as if he couldn’t have trusted himself to speak again. At the end of the street they’d turned downhill across the intersection, and now the driver eased his wheel over to slant away north-westward, switching to the road that led down to the quayside on that higher reach of the Golden Horn. Motoring down to the Horn, for heaven’s sake – to Goeben herself … No daydream either, the action had started and there was no way of stopping it. High above them, somewhere off to the right, a muezzin greeted the dawn, bearing witness in a raucous chant to Allah’s greatness, calling the Faithful to their daybreak devotions. Visualising the robed figure aloft on some minaret that he couldn’t see from the rumbling motor, Nick was reminded of a diving platform high above the Dart, a plank protruding from a hulk’s side, and himself aged thirteen on the end of it. It was a very high board and until he’d got out on it he hadn’t appreciated how far below the water would be. Looking down at it had brought a chill of fear: an instructor’s bellow had floated up to him – ‘What are ye waitin’ for, the tide?’ The only way off that platform had been over its edge, into the gulf: and it was just like that now. Oh Sarah, my darling… What had sent her image into his mind? What about her anyway – suddenly even his own feelings were uncertain, whether he regretted, would have put the clock back if that had been possible, undone what had been done … Would one? There’d been no moment of decision, no conscious act: it had happened, as something natural and inevitable: for both of them, he thought, it had been like that. And no, he did not regret it, because if it had not happened there’d have been an ingredient missing, something that was important now. Might she feel the same? And if the reason for her rushing to join his father in London was the one he’d guessed at, how would it seem to her – if it had all happened, and she’d buried the truth so well – as time passed, how would it be for her?
The possibility that she’d keep the secret even to the extent of never discussing it with him was a new and startling concept. It had sprung, of course, as an answer to the puzzle about those letters she’d written – the attitude of detachment, mild stepmotherly affection … If it turned out that he was guessing correctly now, receiving finally the message that she’d been trying to impart to him, would he be able to play that game, act as if nothing had ever happened between them? Could so large a lie be so firmly established that to all intents and purposes it would become the truth?
Burtenshaw’s voice croaked beside him, ‘It’s – God, it’s hopeless!’
‘What is?’
He wouldn’t have to tell any lies, or live one. He couldn’t, he knew, possibly survive this – Burtenshaw was right, this hopeless operation. Gleam of water ahead: dawn’s silver on the Golden Horn. That dark mass rising against godown rooftops was smoke – a big ship’s funnel-smoke. Burtenshaw answered him: ‘This stunt, this attempt to blow up a—’
‘God’s sake, man, who’d have thought this time yesterday that we’d get this far?’ He wished at once that he hadn’t said that. One shouldn’t admit to any doubt. He added, ‘You’ll feel better when the action starts.’
The motor’s tyres thrummed as Herman turned without slackening speed around the corner of an ugly red-stone building. Port offices of some kind. Now the tyres sang on cobbles. Quayside: a wide area like a square in a small market town. The water was right ahead, its black sheen broken by the silhouette of a waiting tug. There was a graving dock between the waterfront and the building on their left. But they’d swung right, behind a long cargo shed with chains on its doors and a stink of wet hides in the air around it. Near the farther end of it, Herman turned his head and shouted, pointing a gloved hand towards the left; then he had both hands back on the wheel and he was leaning sideways in the effort of turning the Mercedes around the end of the warehouse and towards the quay.
At the same moment, almost like a fanfare greeting their appearance, Nick heard a bugle-call. The Prussian equivalent of a muezzin, he realised, a Hun sun-up ceremony. Shades of a dreary youth-time spent in Scapa Flow! On Goeben’s stern the black cross with the eagle in its centre would be mounting the ensign-staff. Guard and band to welcome them, now? By God, there was! A double rank of guard with rifles at the ‘present’, right aft on the great expanse of quarterdeck; and the band was striking up now, brass instruments cocked up under the looming barrels of the after eleven-inch turret. All the Germans were wearing fezes. The band had thumped out its short ditty and the bugles blared what must have been their form of ‘carry on’; rifles were thudding to the ‘slope’, a rippling flash as the ranks of bayonets swayed over and the dawn light caught them, silvery-pink light glittering across the Halic, the Golden Horn. Looking upwards, he saw that at the main Goeben was flying a broad-pendant with a black cross on it, a commodore’s flag.
No vice-admiral then, on this trip?
They were rumbling straight towards the after gangway, which led up to the quarterdeck near the stern turret. A point he’d over-looked in his thoughts of where to place the charge struck him as he stared up at the ship’s impressive twenty-three thousand tons of fighting power: since there’d be a bow torpedo room and a stern one in addition to the torpedo flat amidships, it might be possible to get close enough to the after one to blow the whole back-end off her. Drums were beating a tattoo now, boots crashing on oak planking as the quarterdeck was cleared, guard and band marched for’ard. All horribly familiar from one’s own big-ship days: a slightly different, foreign flavour to it, but otherwise much the same. He leant forward and tapped Herman’s shoulder, pointed at the other gangway, up near the first funnel.
‘That one. Stop there.’
Herman was used to driving his general and other senior officers, who invariably would be received on quarterdecks. He was chauffeuring private soldiers now. Lights still burned somewhat unnecessarily at the tops of both gangways. Officers on Goeben’s quarterdeck stared down at them; the quay was shadowed here by the ship’s bulk. As they passed the bottom of the after gangway Nick saw a one-stripe officer in front of a single rank of men with bayonets on their rifles. He looked ahead, at the gangway they’d be stopping at: there was a similar guard at the foot of that one too. Mustering sentries, perhaps, men recalled from posts elsewhere on the quayside. He saw Burtenshaw staring at the bayonets as if he was mesmerised by them: he looked sick. The motor stopped, and Nick muttered, ‘Come on.’ He pushed the door open, grabbed one suitcase, and stepped out on to the running-board and down on to the cobbles, wet from the sea-dew of dawn. Glancing back, he saw the Marine standing, holding the other case and staring up nervously towards the ship. Turning, Nick saw a two-striper coming down the gangway with his eyes fixed on them and far from friendly.
‘Was is das?’
One didn’t have to be a linguist to get the drift. He was pointing at the suitcases and he wanted to see inside them. Nick was thinking, Caught. Already. Well, it was a pretty hopeless thing to have tried. He grinned, as a dim-witted soldier might, and turned the case so that the German could see von Sanders’s name on it; then Burtenshaw, joining him quite suddenly as if he’d that moment snapped out of a trance, stared rather haughtily at the Kapitan-leutnant and let rip with a string of German. Nick swung round, astonished; afterwards he realised that his open-mouthed surprise must have been goofy enough to have matched the earlier grin. The leutnant shrugged, and pushed past them on his way to muster the squad of sentries: a
nd the gangway was unguarded, reaching up into the great grey ship above them.
It felt about as long as Piccadilly: and as exposed as a high-wire in a circus. Burtenshaw was leading: he’d taken the initiative on the quayside and it looked more natural for him to go up first. Halfway up Nick told him, ‘At the top, slant right, go in the screen door and take the first ladder downward.’ Burtenshaw nodded. The head of the gangway rested a few yards for’ard of the foremost of the battlecruiser’s secondary armament of six-inch guns on this starboard side, and the screen door led into the ship at the lowest level of her bridge superstructure. Stumbling up the ribbed slope behind the Marine, Nick was trying to work out the probable location of the beam submerged torpedo flat. It had to stretch clear across the ship, in order to have one tube on either beam, so it had to be somewhere where there was no gun-turret, since the lower parts of each turret, ammunition hoists and so on, extended right down to the bottom of the ship. And with the layout of Goeben’s main armament that really left only the area below the bridge – roughly, therefore, this point of entry. Which would be excellent, because the sooner the charge was placed, the better; and the torpedo flat, with its own explosive content and its location below the waterline, would be a splendid place for guncotton.
Burtenshaw was off the gangway, crossing the ten feet of steel deck towards the open screen door. Now he’d paused, glancing back over his shoulder; Nick passed him and led the way inside.
There was a ladderway leading upward, another downward, and a transverse passageway over to the port side. Guessing there’d be the same up-and-down ladder system duplicated over there and that on the outboard side there might be less coming and going, Nick went straight ahead. And he’d guessed right: there was a matching down-ladder leading through an open rectangular hatch and with a taut chain for a handrail. He went down it quickly, with Burtenshaw’s German boots close above him clumping on the steel treads. At the bottom they were in a fore-and-aft passageway with various doors leading off it and dim lights glowing on the painted bulkheads; and they were still well above the waterline. A group of sailors came by, hurrying, glancing at the soldiers curiously as they passed. One of them shouted something that made others laugh, and Burtenshaw waved his free hand, grunted in a friendly way. Five minutes ago he’d seemed to be a dead loss; now, he was worth his weight in diamonds. Nick clapped him on the shoulder: ‘Marvellous … We need to get down a couple more decks. Perhaps three.’ The head of the next ladderway was a dozen feet aft: they clattered down it, clutching their cases of explosive. Ladders and passages were narrower than in large British ships and deckheads were much lower: had one been a claustrophobiac, Nick thought, one might well feel uncomfortable, down here. More so, oddly, than in the submarine. Burtenshaw panted, close behind him, ‘This is absolutely – impossible, it’s—’ and Nick cut him short: ‘Don’t think about it. Too late for thinking.’ He thought it might be the key to Burtenshaw: keep him moving, doing. Well, it might be the key to anyone. Down another ladder, and he thought they’d be roughly at the water-level now. He was stepping off the ladder when a hand grasped his arm.
A petty officer: the insignia suggested some engine-room rate. He’d barked a question – loudly but in quite a friendly, semi-amused manner, something like Where the hell d’you think you’re going? Nick let his lower jaw sag, assuming a baffled expression which was less a matter of acting than of having no other way to react, and Burtenshaw came up trumps again, saying they were searching for the officers’ baggage store. He showed the PO the name on the cases: the man’s eyebrows rose and fell, and he looked vaguely contemptuous – perhaps to make up for the fact that for the moment he’d been impressed — as he jerked a thumb, told them to get back up three levels and then right aft; and get a move on, or they’d find themselves at sea … He’d pushed them towards the ladder, one hand on each. By the time they were halfway up it, though, he’d moved away for’ard and swung a bulkhead door shut behind him, and they started down again. They were below the waterline now, and the lower they went in the ship the hotter, clammier it got. Inside the coarse uniform, Nick was already streaming wet. He muttered to Burtenshaw, ‘Your German gets by, all right’; the Marine made a face, as if he wasn’t all that sure of it.
Where this ladder ended – it took them into the centreline of the ship, port and starboard ladder-systems combining – was an entrance for’ard to a messdeck, and a transverse passage with humming machinery behind steel-mesh cages, and over on the port side another passage of some sort led aft; but at this point there was no way on down. The messdeck, however, was deserted, and a short way inside it was a closed hatch.
‘See what’s down here.’
Better than dithering about: and the sooner they got this stuff planted, the better.
Only two clips held the hatch shut. Nick loosened them by kicking the butterfly nuts round with his heel, and Burtenshaw knocked them off; then they pulled the hatch up, and Nick slid through on to the ladder. Dim lighting, and a peculiar smell that was in a way familiar and yet out of place, seemed not to belong. Thrum of machinery: not down here, but aft, trembling through the ship. Moving off the quay? There’d be help from tugs until she was out clear of the floating bridge. Here was a wet-smelling, odd-smelling, cramped steel flat, and on his left at the ladder’s foot was a hammock-netting – a railed enclosure like a stall in a cattle-market – full of hammocks and kitbags. Near it a door, which he opened, and found himself looking into a bathroom flat, or wash-place. Steel basins, lavatories, lagged pipes, and a grating overhead with the whirr of fans sounding from it. Burtenshaw mutterered, ‘No torpedoes. Just—’
‘What’s that say?’
Outside, and on the far side of the ladder, a small, elliptical door was set high in the after bulkhead, and there were German words stencilled in red beside it. Burtenshaw translated, ‘Entry forbidden except to authorised personnel on duty’. There was a padlock on one of the retaining clips, and it was about two inches thick. Nick thought this might well be a way into the torpedo flat. Almost certainly there’d be something in there worth damaging, and the odds were that it would be explosive. It might, he thought, be the torpedo warhead store, connecting to the flat itself on the other side. In any case it was as good a bet as any. Then, looking round, he saw the concrete.
This was what he’d smelt. It was the bulkhead nearest to the ship’s side, beyond the hammock netting. They’d painted it grey, which was why he hadn’t noticed it at first, particularly in this rotten light. It was a concrete lining to the real bulkhead, and the only possible explanation was that this was how, with the extremely limited repair facilities here at the Golden Horn, they’d repaired the ship’s action damage – quite possibly mine-damage sustained during her last sortie, when she’d sunk the monitors in Kusu Bay.
It was a perfect spot for the explosion. Smash through that concrete, and you’d be blasting into previous – existing – damage.
‘Set your charge up.’ He put his case down. ‘I’ll make a space for it.’ He began to drag hammocks out of the netting, dumping them temporarily against the ladder. They’d be useful, to tamp down the charge as well as to hide it … Working fast, before someone might come down and catch them at it. ‘Quick as you can, Bob.’ Burtenshaw had the cases open and he was piling all the guncotton into one, lashing the whole lot together with tape, in the shape it had been in before they’d divided it. Nick pulled out one more hammock, leaving a hole deep enough to drop the charge right down into the angle between deck and bulkhead – the concrete one. He looked round again: Burtenshaw had taken a detonator out of a little tin that held half a dozen of them, and he was fixing one end of the white coil of fuse into it, squeezing it tight with pliers and then sliding the detonator into the middle of the charge, with a loop of tape around the fuse to hold it in place. He looked up.
‘Ready.’
‘Light it, then.’
‘Right.’ His hands were shaking as he set it going. For a moment nothing happe
ned, then the end of the fuse glowed red and began to fizz. He shut the case: then hesitated, opened it again. ‘Best not have it airtight. Might put it out.’ Nick helped him lower the suitcase with its lid slightly open into the nest among the hammocks and other gear, and then they piled the rest back in on top of it.
Done. And if they could get well away from this part of the ship, it would be a thousand to one against the thing being found before it went off. Burtenshaw murmured, as if struck suddenly by the enormity of what they’d been doing, ‘It’s a huge charge.’
‘Good.’ Nick turned to the ladder, and picked up the other case. ‘Back up now, up at least two decks, then aft. Far away from here as possible.’
‘I’m – with you there.’ He’d actually smiled. Nick told him, ‘You lead. If we’re stopped again, ask to be directed to the admiral’s quarters.’
‘Couldn’t we get right up on the upper deck?’
‘Not yet, anyway … Up you go.’
How would one explain an empty suitcase with two men to carry it? Not easily, he thought. But the general’s name might pull a certain amount of wool over Teutonic eyes. They’d reached the top of the second ladder; he answered Burtenshaw’s backward glance with a nod. ‘Up one more, then turn right.’ Climbing again: and the ship was definitely under way, the machinery noise a steady, throbbing hum. He wished they could have gone up top, into fresh air and where they could see what was happening; it occurred to him that while they’d been down in that empty messdeck they should have borrowed some sailors’ gear instead of the field-grey they were wearing so conspicuously. Damn… Worth going back, he wondered? Dressed as sailors, in a ship with a complement of about a thousand men, you could hide for ever, with any decent ration of luck… But he decided against it: now, leaving harbour, all the hands not working would be fallen in, lined up on the upper deck and fully fezed, no doubt; but at any moment Goeben would be out clear of the Galata bridge and the hands would be dismissed and go pouring down the ladders. The possibility of being caught down there where they’d placed the charge wasn’t one that could be taken. Tramping aft now, boots ringing on the steel deck. The ship had a sparse, stripped-down look: when you looked closely you saw that there was nothing inflammable anywhere, only bare steel, not a stick of wood in sight. A ship intended for fighting, not for living in. Bulkhead doors on either side at intervals, with high sills: machinery noise getting louder as they went towards the stern. Now and then a sailor glanced at them, muttered something as they squeezed past, or stared through an open doorway: all right so far, but luck had some limit to it: and God, Nick recalled suddenly, helped those who helped themselves. Helped themselves to sailors’ uniforms – from some other messdeck? Now, quickly, while there was still a chance and before the hands were sent below?
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 27
