Orphans of the Storm (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

  It was some minutes later that he saw the light. At first he thought it was in the town on the southern shore then he realised it was lifting and falling on the surface of the sea. He spun the wheel, altering course towards it and stamped on the deck.

  The wheelhouse stood over one end of the saloon and that stamping sounded over Mike Garrity’s head like a summoning drum. He came stumbling up through the hatch onto the deck abaft the wheelhouse, a sou’wester jammed on his head and struggling into an oilskin. It flapped and clapped as the wind caught it then he’d made it fast with a length of sail-twine knotted about his waist. He clawed open the wheelhouse door and demanded, “What’s going on?”

  Jake shouted back at him, “There’s somebody floating in the river! See the light? Get forrard with a line and give me the sign when I need to cut the motor.”

  Garrity ducked out of the wheelhouse, snatched a rope from a cleat by the door and hurried forward along the narrow strip of deck past the hold. He halted in the waist, peering forward into the night, watching the light that was a distinct beam now, not just a dancing glow in the darkness.

  Jake watched his crouching figure, threw out the clutch when he saw Garrity’s frantically waving arm and hooked a becket around a spoke of the wheel to try to hold the Mary Ellen head to sea. He switched on the lamp mounted atop the wheelhouse, normally only used when they loaded or cast off at night, then ran forward to help his captain.

  The pool of light cast by the lamp on the wheelhouse showed a swimmer, a man wearing a lifejacket with a torch jammed in the top of it shedding a jerky beam. Mike Garrity had thrown the line to him and the swimmer was working his arms through the loop on the end of it. His arms came down and the two on the lighter hauled him in.

  Smith came over the side streaming water, spitting it, retching. He coughed then wheezed out, “Two more!” He waved a hand behind him at the black sea.

  Jake peered out and saw them, shadows on the edge of the pool of light, glimpsed and then briefly lost as they sank in a valley between two of the big rollers coming in from the sea, seen again as they rose. He saw movement and the splash of white water. They were swimming. Garrity had worked the line off the man now sitting up on the deck. Jake seized it and told him, “Get that guy outa the way!” He coiled the line as Mike started to drag the man aft, only to have his hands brushed aside. The man got shakily to his feet and staggered towards the wheelhouse. Mike went with him, saw him safely to the wider deck in the stern and aft of the hold, then hurried back to help Jake.

  He found him hauling in the line with another swimmer clutching the end of it. They lifted him aboard, a big man, helping himself but heavy of body and weighted down with clothes and oilskin. Then they cast the line again and pulled in the third. This one was far lighter, slender under the lifejacket and oilskin. Mike herded the two ahead of him to join the first by the wheelhouse and Jake coiled the line as he walked aft, hung it on its cleat.

  Mike said, “I’ll get ’em below.” He slid open the hatch leading to the saloon and cabins then gestured to the dripping survivors to go down.

  Jake nodded, “OK, I’ve got her.” He swung up into the wheelhouse, let in the clutch and brought the pitching lighter back on her course and under steerage way again. He wondered who the three were. And where had they come from? A shipwreck? Mike would let him know.

  In the saloon, warm from the stove in the little galley just aft of it, Mike Garrity pushed in behind the other three who filled the confined space. He said to their backs, “I’m Mike Garrity and the tall young feller that gave me a hand up there was Jake Tyler. He’s my mate and the rest o’ the crew for that matter. He’s a Yank but a good lad for all that. You’re English, though?”

  They all turned to face him and Smith answered, “I am.”

  Garrity said, “Thought so. But strip those wet clothes off …” His voice trailed away then as he stared at Buckley in the light from the lamp hanging from the deckhead.

  Smith said, “We’ll cheerfully oblige, but we have a lady with us.” He gestured open-handed towards Véronique who now pulled off her hat so her hair hung down in rat’s tails. Her spectacles had steamed up in the heat of the saloon and she took them off and tried to wipe them on a sodden handkerchief. She was shivering now. Smith went on, “The lady’s name is Mamzelle Véronique Duclos. She is French but speaks very good English.”

  Garrity said, “Ah … Yes … Well …” He was not looking at any of them now. He pushed past Smith and Buckley with his head bent and mumbled, “The lady can use this.” He held open the door of his cabin. As the French girl cautiously ventured in he said, “You’ll find the bunk comfortable, there’s a towel on the rail at the end of it and a clean shirt in the locker that you can wear for sleeping. And here—” He fumbled behind the door of the other cabin, brought out Jake’s robe and passed it to the girl, explaining, “I don’t have one o’ them.”

  He closed the door on her and held open the door of Jake’s cabin for Smith and Buckley. “This is the Mate’s. Just the one bunk. One o’ you will have to sleep on the deck.”

  Smith said impatiently, “We’ll be all right out here. We won’t turn the Mate out of his bunk.” He pointed at the leather cushions on the couches running along each side of the table. “If you will let me have a towel and a blanket, please?” He was dragging off his wet clothes and called to Garrity as he rummaged in a locker, “Are you master of this lighter?”

  Garrity emerged from the locker with towels. He had discarded his oilskin and stood in his old boilersuit, the grizzled hair on his bony chest showing at the neck. He answered proudly, “I am.”

  Smith took a towel, tossed one to Buckley, started to dry himself and explained, “I am an officer in the Royal Navy. We were prisoners aboard a German cruiser and escaped from her at the mouth of the river here. I believe she intends to enter the port to have her bow repaired, may even be there now.”

  Garrity did not question Smith’s claim that he was a naval officer, but — “A cruiser?” His voice rose in disbelief.

  Smith nodded, rubbing at his chest. “Brandenburg.”

  Garrity frowned. “You mean a real cruiser? How big a ship are you talking about?”

  “Seven, possibly eight thousand tons.”

  Garrity said definitely, “Then she isn’t in the port nor ever will be. There’s no dockyard and a ship that size must have a draught of fifteen to twenty feet. There’s just a quay and a breakwater and any ship drawing more than eight feet has to lie out in the river and discharge by lighter. I pick up a lot of work that way. Your cruiser won’t get her repairs done here.” He ducked around into the galley.

  Smith, wrapped in a blanket, sat on one end of a couch and revised his theory. He had thought the boat returning to Brandenburg had brought a pilot to take her into port. But now? Maybe the boat had just gone in to seek information and the cruiser had now hauled out to sea. He took the mug of coffee Garrity handed him with the words: “Drop o’ something in it to get the chill outa you.” Smith sipped it and could smell the rum with which it was laced.

  Garrity passed a mug to Buckley but kept his head averted. Buckley took the mug but his eyes followed Garrity, puzzled. The master of the Mary Ellen passed another mug around the door to the French girl: “Here y’are, Miss. Summat to warm you up.”

  He turned and Smith said, “All right. She can’t be in port but she is in these waters. I need to get ashore as early as possible and pass the word to the consul. Our ships must be informed.” He knew Harwood had a squadron of four cruisers on this South American station.

  Garrity shook his head. “There ain’t a consul. Nearest one is a coupla hundred miles north up the coast. You have to remember this is a big, empty country, big as the USA but with only a third of its population.” Jake Tyler had told him that. He carried on, “Once you get away from the coast you won’t find a bleeding soul. And this is only a small place and full o’ Germans. Some of them are good lads and we used to get on very friendly, but the
war’s changed all that o’ course. And a lot of them are Nazis. They control the telephone exchange and the radio station so they wouldn’t let you get that sort of message out. If you tried they’d just turn you in to the police and you’d be interned. And if the police wanted to get your message out you can bet your life neither the telephones nor the radio would be working.”

  Internment; Smith hadn’t thought of that but of course they would intern him. But — He asked, “Is there a British ship in the river? With wireless?” Such a ship could send his signal, and hide him until she was safely out of Brazilian waters.

  But Garrity was shaking his head again, “Only two ships come in here, one to load the iron ore from the quarry across the river but she’s not due for another three weeks and she’s Brazilian, anyway. The only British ship is the Sotheby. She runs down the coast from the States every month, calls here on the way down and again on the way up. She’s due on the seventeenth—” He broke off to glance at a calendar hung on the bulkhead then went on, “That’s in three days’ time. She’ll be headed north then, back to the States.”

  Smith swore softly in frustration. He said quietly, “I have to get this message out. This cruiser has been, and will be, sinking British merchantmen. She has to be stopped.”

  Garrity rubbed at the stubble on his jaw. “Yessir. I see that. Tell you what, I’m loading a cargo in the morning to take over to the quarry. That’s German owned and they’d never let you use their phone to give this Brandenburg away. But they send a truck up the coast every day. You keep quiet about the cruiser and being Navy and you’ll be able to get a lift. You can pass the word to the first consul you meet but it’ll take you all of a day to get to him in that truck. That’s the best I can do, sir. And like I said, if you show your faces ashore they’ll run you inside.” Garrity sounded nervous but sincere.

  Smith wondered if he should put a brave face on it and try to browbeat the police into letting him telephone or send a radio message? But if he failed and wound up under lock and key then it might be days before the news filtered through to the consul. And Buckley and himself might be interned for the rest of the war. He would have to be content with Garrity’s solution. So he reluctantly agreed, “Very well. But I have your word that you won’t report our presence to the authorities ashore?”

  “Yessir. I won’t tell anybody. Now why don’t you get a few hours’ sleep while the night lasts.”

  Smith took his advice and stretched out on one of the couches. The delay irked him, but — something else, said or on the edge of his memory, troubled him. And he still believed his original conclusion had been correct: Brandenburg would not attempt a crossing of the North Atlantic with that hole in her bow.

  As his body relaxed his thoughts drifted, to Moehle and the young Oberleutnant, Kurt Larsen. Were they still out there aboard Brandenburg, seeking some other port? Logic answered that they were but Smith shook his head slowly in instinctive disagreement. When it ceased moving he was asleep.

  Buckley was already snoring on the other couch. Garrity got out the bottle he had opened for the doctor, sat down at the table and drank Scotch deeply from the bottle. When he lowered it he shuddered and wiped his watering eyes. The corners of his mouth stayed turned down and he looked ready to cry. He said miserably, “Just my flaming luck.” He fell asleep a half-pint of whisky later.

  So Jake Tyler brought the Mary Ellen home alone after one quick glance below to see Garrity with his head on his arms on the table, the near-empty bottle cuddled in the triangle formed by head and crooked right arm. Jake was not surprised; that was not the first time.

  He brought the lighter alongside the quay, secured her and dropped down the ladder to the saloon below. One of the survivors was missing and presumably was in Garrity’s cabin because Jake’s was empty. Maybe the guy was injured? But explanations could wait. He stripped off his wet clothes and crawled into his bunk. There had been no opportunity to tell Garrity what he had seen. Or thought he had seen. Should he tell him and risk the taunts if he had been mistaken? A warship? In this river? It would be light soon. He slept.

  *

  Goetz said, “I was here in ’37.” He stood at the back of Brandenburg’s bridge with Kurt Larsen. The Executive Officer, Paul Brunner, was a yard in front of them. They could see over his shoulder to the pilot standing by the captain seated in his tall chair. Goetz was silent a moment, remembering, then: “The ship I was in was moored off the port and some of us officers came up here in a launch one afternoon. It was sort of a run ashore, to do some fishing and see the falls. They’re about fifteen miles from the mouth of the river. We should be up to them soon.”

  Kurt Larsen stared out at the wide river, glinting deep blue in the night and veined with white from Brandenburg’s bow wave. She was steaming with revolutions for five knots but only making three over the ground and against the current. Kurt said, “And there’ll be room for us in the pool below the falls?”

  Goetz nodded, “Plenty. And nobody to bother us.”

  Larsen said uneasily, “I don’t like the thought of being stuck fifteen miles up a river in a neutral country.”

  Goetz laughed, “Don’t worry about the Brazilians. I’ve told you, nobody lives up here. We’ll be gone before they can know anything about it down on the coast. And what could they do if they did find out?”

  Kurt said, “It just feels like a trap.”

  Paul Brunner spoke over his shoulder, “In the last war the cruiser Königsberg hid in an African river and made her repairs.”

  Kurt answered, “Yes, sir, but she didn’t get out again. The Royal Navy bottled her up and finally destroyed her.”

  Brunner turned and grinned at him confidently, “But this isn’t the Rufiji delta and nobody, let alone the Royal Navy, knows we are here.”

  “Your attention, gentlemen, please.” Moehle had turned around on his tall chair to speak to them. He looked thoughtfully at Kurt Larsen and said quietly, “We have to support Graf Spee. With our speed cut to less than twenty knots by that hole in our bow we would be more hindrance than help. So we must carry out repairs.” His lips twitched in a smile, “And who would think to look for us here?” He paused, still watching Kurt, as if to say that he agreed with the Oberleutnant and was explaining why he was taking the risk. When he went on he spoke to Paul Brunner: “The pilot wishes to buoy the entrance to the pool …”

  Brandenburg anchored fore and aft then her launch was swung out and lowered down to the water. With the pilot in its sternsheets the launch throbbed away upriver and was lost in the darkness.

  Kurt Larsen watched it go from the bridge. The evolution of lowering the launch had reminded him of the prisoners. They had escaped while the launch was being winched aboard after bringing off the pilot. The young Leutnant in charge of them had been missed from his usual place of duty soon after Brandenburg entered the river. The searchers had found him and the sentry in minutes, he had told the story to the captain and Moehle had given him a dressing down.

  Moehle had told Kurt drily, “This agent — or naval captain, whatever he is — of yours, appears to be elusive.”

  Kurt said worriedly, “Do you think he and the others might report us?”

  Moehle shook his head, “The pilot says he would be arrested and interned as soon as he set foot ashore and our countrymen would never allow him to advertise our presence.”

  Kurt had been reassured at the time but now he had doubts. He wondered where Captain Smith was and what he was doing.

  The launch returned as the sun, rising but still below the horizon, reddened the sky astern. The pilot came aboard and Brandenburg weighed anchor. She got under way again, towing the launch now and edging slowly upstream through the early morning mist that hung like thin smoke above the surface of the water. Kurt could not see the banks of the river.

  Brandenburg rounded a bend and the pool came into sight. The river spilled over the edge of a plateau to drop a hundred feet and where the water fell it had scoured a small la
ke over the centuries. The river was still wide but the pool was wider. The buoys put down by the men in the launch bobbed bright orange on the current, marking the entrance to the pool. Outside of the buoys the river shelved rapidly, too shallow for Brandenburg’s nineteen-foot draught.

  Moehle took her in. Kurt had assembled the gang of men who were to work under him and he stood with them in the bow. He saw the marker buoys slide slowly and closely past the ship’s sides with only feet to spare; Brandenburg was forty-eight feet in the beam. But she went through and when in the pool Moehle turned her, inching her round almost on her axis by use of her screws and rudder, until she faced downstream once more. Then she anchored. It had been a masterly exhibition of ship-handling by Moehle and Kurt applauded it mentally.

  As soon as the cruiser’s engines stopped the launch set off downstream carrying a crew of seven under the command of an Obermaat. The petty officer’s orders were to watch for anyone approaching upriver and take them under guard back to the ship. Moehle was taking no chances and setting a sentry on the door behind him.

  Now Brandenburg’s crew could go to work on her damage and they jumped to it. Kurt and his party began rigging staging over the side where the Whitby, with Smith at the wheel, had smashed a long hole in her bow. Then they would remove the makeshift patch that had been rigged at sea. Meanwhile other parties were starting on the long labour of transferring fuel, stores and ammunition from the starboard to the port side. When the ship was listed over far enough for the gash to be clear of the river then another party would begin the work of cutting away the ragged edges of steel plate to make the hole ‘clean’ for the repair.

  Kurt looked up and out only once and saw that the mist had been burned up by the sun. Now he could see the banks of the river, swampland steaming in the heat of the sun, but beyond stood tall timber. It would hide Brandenburg from anyone who did not come through the timber to the river-bank. He told himself that Moehle and Brunner were right and their ship was safe here. He was still uneasy.