Orphans of the Storm (Commander Cochrane Smith series)

by Alan Evans

Jake said, “That’s all right. Come on.”

  They walked back to the Mary Ellen and found her loading completed and the chief stevedore waiting with the manifest. They checked it together then Garrity signed one copy for the chief, who took it and left. Jake then slid back the hatchcover and he and Garrity descended the ladder to the saloon. They found the other three now dressed, their clothes badly creased but dry. The girl sat on one of the leather couches at the table and Jake could see her legs under it, clothed in the light blue cotton trousers in which she had left the Whitby. Buckley stood on one side of the saloon, Smith on the other, one hand in the pocket of his jacket. Jake wondered absently why he wore the jacket; the inside of the saloon was heating up as the sun burned the deck overhead.

  Jake told Smith, “I’ve changed my mind.” His voice was toneless. “I had a cable.” He pulled it half out of his shirt pocket then pushed it back. He saw no need to read out the details of how the executors of his parents had searched for him and finally traced him through the Boston bank which held his money and sent his cheques. Or their statement that he was the sole heir and the request that he contact them as soon as possible. That could wait. He told the four crowded in the saloon the part that mattered: “Some German sub torpedoed a liner called the Athenia. My mother and stepfather were on it. They weren’t among the survivors. So I’ll beg or borrow a boat from somewhere to take you upriver.”

  Garrity said softly, “I’m sorry, lad.”

  Jake shrugged, “Thanks. There’s no reason for you to get involved but maybe you’ll sell us the rifle and some shells.”

  Garrity cleared his throat and addressed Smith, “Well, I’ve been thinking it over, and all things considered I think I should take you to look for this cruiser and try to hold her up.”

  Buckley said, “We’ll be able to talk over old times.”

  One corner of Garrity’s mouth went up then drooped sadly again. “I thought you’d remember before long.” He told Jake, “I knew this feller back in 1917—” he nodded at Buckley, “—when we were both in the Navy. But after the war, well, in 1922 I jumped ship in Rio because I had another two years to serve and I couldn’t stick the discipline any longer. I’m a deserter. Now they’ll claim me back from here and it’ll be the bloody cells for me.” He rubbed two-handed at his face then looked hopefully at Smith: “Unless maybe, I can get a good mark or two on my record.” Jake thought that this explained Garrity’s sudden patriotism; he was still Navy at heart.

  Garrity continued, “But I’m not looking forward to this. If that cruiser is hiding upriver …” His voice tailed off and he shuddered at his thoughts.

  Smith said, “None of us are looking forward to it.” He glanced at Véronique Duclos and asked, “Have you reached a decision?”

  She hesitated. This captain with the cold blue eyes and sudden quick smile had told her he was determined to hunt for the German cruiser. Véronique could hold her tongue and travel north to the nearest French consul but he would prefer she went along in the Mary Ellen.

  She looked up at Smith, “Why do you want me?”

  He said, “You’re a doctor. You could be very useful.”

  She took that in, with its implications of danger and injury, as they all did. She remembered the train crash and saw her duty clearly again: “I see. Then I think I should go with you.”

  Garrity said, “We’ll get under way.” He climbed the ladder and Jake followed him.

  Smith and Buckley exchanged glances and Smith took his hands out of his pockets. The pistol he had taken from the young Leutnant still made a bulge in the right side of his jacket but he would not have to press Garrity and Jake into service at pistol-point.

  They sailed at noon and turned upriver when out of sight of the port. Smith had written on a sheet torn from his notebook, wrinkled as it had dried, a formal order requisitioning the lighter for service in the Royal Navy. He did not know if that was legal or whether he was now a pirate but the order was now in Garrity’s pocket.

  Smith told himself wryly that now he had a command. He was captain of the Mary Ellen. With a deserter, a neutral and a French girl for crew — and Buckley, thank God! He laughed and they wondered why. He could not tell them.

  Chapter Thirteen – The Hunt

  The Mary Ellen dug her snub nose into the current for the next four hours. Garrity took the helm first and the rest of them sat on the deck by the wheelhouse, glad to be out of the airless cabin. Jake rigged a green canvas awning, spread on steel supports, over the after deck but they still sweltered in its shade.

  When Jake relieved Garrity at the wheel Mike went below to the galley and cooked a meal of hash for all five of them. At the end of it the French girl said, “I think we should all help in some way. I will cook if you like.” No one objected.

  Véronique, dark hair tied back with a twist of cord, wore a shirt borrowed from Garrity because her blouse was torn. He kept them for cold weather and the rest of the time settled for a singlet. The garment swathing Véronique was wool, thick and rough, hot and uncomfortable. Jake, bare-chested, thought, Poor kid. And when she passed him he said gruffly, “Hey! You’ll find some cotton shirts in the bottom drawer under my bunk. Help yourself.”

  She paused a moment, startled, then murmured, “Thank you.” And moved on quickly. But soon she appeared in one of his shirts and smiled her thanks again.

  Smith, jacket discarded and his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows now, had Garrity take Buckley and himself over the lighter. They traversed the hundred foot, black-painted, steel-plate length of her from the canoe carried upside-down in her bow to the little dinghy resting on chocks in her stern. They stopped in the waist, her widest point where she was twenty feet in the beam, and peered into her hold. Smith asked what was in the cargo intended for the quarry and Garrity reeled off the list, finger pointing out each item in the open hold: “Cement, timber, diesel oil, flour, canned goods …” on and on, then finishing, “… and under the tarpaulin there is the dynamite for blasting, the fuse and all that stuff.” Smith nodded.

  They all sweated and watched the shore creep by on either hand. First there was the belt of low undergrowth in the foreground, stunted trees growing into and out of the river that curled brown with mud between their twisted trunks. They swept back for distances of a hundred yards or up to a half-mile before blending into the background of the tall timber of the forest on the higher ground. Every now and again there were gaps in the walls of low trees forming the river banks where tributary streams wound out from the forest to join the main current.

  Then Smith got to his feet, went prowling about the Mary Ellen again and Garrity muttered, “Can’t the man rest?”

  Soon afterwards he said reluctantly, “Not far now. Another half-hour, maybe.”

  Smith peered upstream and squinted against the sun glinting off the surface of the river to hurt the eye. He said, “Pull in to the left hand bank and I’ll go ashore. Can you lend me a pair of binoculars? I want to see what’s around that next bend. You wait until I give you the signal, then come and take me off.”

  Jake Tyler spun the wheel and the Mary Ellen nosed into the trees as he threw out the clutch. Smith dropped over the bow into muddy water that came up to his waist and waded through the trees. He worked upstream until he could see around the curve to the next reach of the river, then he set Mike Garrity’s binoculars to his eyes and painstakingly swept the banks on either side. He kept at it, patiently, for some minutes but finally lowered the glasses and waved to Garrity. Then he waded out to the edge of the trees again to climb aboard the lighter as Jake brought her in to him.

  From that time on Smith repeated the performance at each bend in the river. Until Garrity said, “After this one there’s a straight reach of nearly a mile then we round one last curve and we’ll be looking at the pool.”

  The next bend was a hairpin as the river curled around a long neck of land. Jake found an inlet that led part-way across this neck before the stream turned inland. He steer
ed the lighter into it as far as that turning then stopped her, nestling among the trunks slimy with weed. Smith dropped over the bow and waded between the tilted, dwarf trees the rest of the way across the neck of land until he opened the next reach. There he stopped in the shelter of the trees and swept the mile length of the reach with the glasses. Then again. And yet again, concentrating now on one patch of shade below overhanging trees a half-mile away on the opposite bank. Because something had moved …

  After the eye-aching glitter of sunlight on the surface of the river the shade under the trees on that opposite bank was almost black. But at last his eyes pierced the dimness and the boat took shape. The movement had been made by a man sitting on its foredeck before the lift of the cabin. He wore a sailor’s white tropical rig and held a rifle or carbine across his knees. The boat was a naval launch.

  Smith marked the spot on his mental map then searched the banks of the river again and grunted with satisfaction when he found what he sought, the mouth of an inlet on that opposite bank but short of the pinnace by two hundred yards or more.

  He made one last sweep — and froze momentarily, then was up and running. The water reaching above his waist chained his legs and the mud on the river bottom dragged at his feet. He floundered back to the lighter in desperate haste. When he was still a hundred yards away he shouted breathlessly, “Get the awning down! Bring her right in!” He waved his arm furiously, beckoning.

  Jake hesitated for a moment, worried about grounding the Mary Ellen, but Buckley told him, “Do as he says! Something’s gone badly wrong!” And Garrity nodded so Jake let in the clutch and eased the lighter forward until he felt her gently take the ground, when he threw out the clutch again.

  Buckley reached over the side to haul Smith in, dripping green water, trailing weed and mud, but he still panted as he came up, “German boat coming downstream! Hang that awning over the stern so it covers us!” He led them in the work, frenziedly manhandling the flapping folds of stiff canvas so the awning hung from the aftermost of its steel supports, but now like a rumpled curtain hiding the Mary Ellen from anyone on the river.

  Or so he hoped. He cast one swift glance over the hurried attempt at camouflage and decided it would have to serve. “Everybody get down on the deck because a lot of faces will show white! And movement will catch the eye so keep still!” They obeyed him and he followed their example except that he lay propped on his elbows so he could see over the lighter’s low bulwark. Somebody had to watch the launch from Brandenburg.

  He had regained his breath after that squandering of energy in the oven heat of the afternoon, was now able to speak evenly and give them some further explanation. “There’s a guardboat stationed on the next reach, starboard side about halfway up, a sentry armed with a rifle aboard her. I saw her, and then another boat came down. There are men on her deck but they shouldn’t see us from the river because of the trees.”

  Jake, stripped to his shorts, shifted uneasily as he lay prostrate on the hot steel deck that burned his body as if he were on a skillet. He did not agree with Smith. He had been able to see over the trees, just, to the river. Then he remembered he was a foot taller than most people and had been standing in the wheelhouse, another foot higher than the deck. But would the wheelhouse be visible from the river?

  Smith answered his question, murmuring, “The trees and the awning will only work if the look-outs on that boat aren’t really looking. If any one of them really searches, concentrates …” As he had done when he located the guardboat. He had no need to finish the sentence. And now the launch came into sight.

  The river had narrowed to less than a quarter-mile wide here and the launch was running down the middle of it, so was passing only about two hundred yards from the lighter. Because of the way the inlet in which the lighter lay ran upstream and almost parallel to the river, the launch did not appear in Smith’s arc of vision until it was astern of the Mary Ellen. It showed no sign of turning aside, so it had passed without seeing the lighter behind the stunted trees.

  Smith took a breath — then held it. There were several men in the well of the launch, all in tropical white naval uniforms and two of them at least with rifles slung over their shoulders. One of these turned to glance back. He seemed to look directly at the green square of the awning that hid the lighter, but then his head turned away to face forward again. The launch puttered on, down the river and out of sight.

  Aboard the lighter they sat up and Garrity said, “Wonder where it was going?”

  Jake answered, “Maybe to meet one of their friends. They have plenty in town.”

  Garrity nodded agreement. They knew nothing of Brandenburg’s pilot, now on his way home.

  Jake looked at Smith, “You said the man on the guardboat was armed. What about the launch that just passed us?” And when Smith nodded, Jake said, “Then it’s a good job you acted so quick. These guys aren’t wanting visitors and they’re ready to do something about any who show up.” He paused then, while they all looked at Smith, bedraggled with his clothes drying on him, his hair plastered to his skull. But they looked at him with respect now. Jake said, “And it shows Brandenburg is up here — sir.”

  Smith was staring upriver. “Now we have to find her.”

  And stop her.

  *

  Smith set out once again but this time Buckley and Jake, with Garrity’s Lee-Enfield rifle slung over his shoulder, went with him. They crossed the river in the Mary Ellen’s dinghy, Jake tugging at the oars, and Smith in the sternsheets looked back over his shoulder at the lighter. Jake said, “She’s hidden pretty good, huh?”

  Smith said, “So long as you’re not looking.” He knew she was there and could pick out her upperworks where they peeped above the trees. He had told Garrity to cut some branches and spread them over the awning covering the stern. That helped and would conceal her from Brandenburg’s launch if it returned from downriver but people moving about her deck would give her away. Garrity and Véronique would be below in the saloon by now, again at Smith’s order. But — He said, “We’ll hide her better than that once it’s dark.”

  Jake ran the boat deep in among the trees on the opposite shore and they dropped over the side into the river. Smith led them, wading through the shallows of the river at first then trudging on a moist soil inland. They forced their way through the interlocking branches of the low trees and crowding undergrowth. So for almost a half-mile until the ground lifted and they were in the tall timber, when they turned and headed upstream. The noise of the falls was a rumbling, steadily rising undertone now.

  From this higher ground they could see over the stunted trees and keep the river in sight. The intervening land was laid out like a map below them so that they found the ‘inlet’ Smith had marked earlier. It turned out to be a stream running into the river, with a side channel joining it about four hundred yards from its mouth. They proved its depth when they went down to it and waded it with the water up to Smith’s chest and Jake said, “It’ll take the Mary Ellen.”

  Smith looked at the trees and curtains of glossy leaves and dangling weeds that masked the entrance to the side channel and said, “It will do very well.”

  They climbed the gentle slope to the forest again and soon passed the guardboat but saw no more of it from this side of the river than Smith had done from the other. There was only the dark outline of the boat in the shadow under the trees and the ghostly white figure of the look-out on the foredeck. Smith said, “He has to rely on his eyes.” He spoke in a conversational tone; there was no need to whisper. They were a hundred yards or more from the boat but they could have shouted because now the roar of the falls hid any other sound. That was important. The look-out would hear nothing and in the night he would be almost blind.

  Smith led them on, doubling back into the trees and climbing more steeply now, then making a long swing to the left heading further upriver before turning once again. The noise of the falls was thunderous now as they descended and they could see above th
e forest the permanent cloud of spray like mist that marked them. Then they were among the last of the tall trees and there were the falls, the pool and—

  Jake said huskily, “Oh, boy! She’s really here! And she’s big!” This was the ship he had glimpsed in the night. He had not been dreaming on his feet.

  Smith’s eyes, like those of the others, went first to Brandenburg as all three of them halted and sank down into the undergrowth of scrub. He crouched just above the entrance to the pool and she lay to his right, anchored fore and aft against the thrust of the current, her head pointing downriver. From this angle he could just see around her bow that swarmed with men to the staging hung there and more men working on it with a glare of acetylene cutting torches. She was listed over to port so that the hole in her hull was clear of the water and he nodded a professional respect for the work that had gone into accomplishing that so soon. But Moehle was working to a tight schedule: Graf Spee had to sail in just over forty-eight hours. So Brandenburg, if she was to go to the aid of the pocket battleship, had to be out of here … Smith calculated quickly: by midnight of the next day, at the latest.

  The falls drew his gaze but their beauty held it only briefly. The sun made rainbows in the perpetual mist hanging over them and bejewelled the crest toppling over the cliff, but Smith saw it only in tactical terms: he could mount no assault from that direction.

  The pool was a quarter-mile across and edged by the stunted trees and bushes growing out of it — the pattern of the rest of the river. There was obviously enough deep water for Brandenburg to have turned but what about the two buoys anchored below him where the river widened into the pool? Did they mark the deep water of the entrance? And if they did, what could he do? He thought about it for some time but finally decided that he did not have enough knowledge of explosives nor of the river bottom, nor did he have a diver. But if that was the entrance …

  He shelved the idea for another time, spent some minutes peering through Garrity’s binoculars at Brandenburg’s bow then turned to start back.